There is a special little place in the dark corner of my heart for plastic surgeons. Sure, a few of them spend their time actually healing people, like children with cleft palates, burn victims, and women who have had mastectomies, but for the most part, practicing “medicine generally is not lucrative enough. The real money comes from generating immense negative feelings in people - mostly women, but increasingly men as well (why lose profits on 50% of the population, right?) – about how they look, even if they happen to look normal, as most of us do. By increasingly changing the definition of “normal (a subjective term at best), the beauty industry has convinced us that small or medium sized breasts, a jiggly ass and thighs, wrinkles, and other “deficiencies found on bodies must be remedied immediately, or you will die alone, forgotten and unloved. Who wants that?

Here I admit that despite my enormous hatred of plastic surgery, I have gone under the knife. A mere few years ago, I was busting out of a DD bra. The problem with naturally enormous boobs is the tendency of gravity to suck them down to earth. Believe me, the sag can get rather ugly. Letting the sisters hang free always posed a danger to my kneecaps. I exaggerate slightly, but when I sat down while braless, the girls were pretty much in my lap. If the Navy ran out of torpedoes, I could have donated my boobs to save the country.

Another challenge large breasts pose is heftiness. Even when holstered into place with a bra that had cups made out of Kevlar and straps as wide as an eight lane highway, my shoulder boulders really lived up to their name in that they weighed a ton. I am only about five feet tall, and at least half my body appeared to be my boobs. It was very hard for me to carry around my chest and anything else, like a backpack or purse. My shoulders and neck hurt like hell and my bra straps were starting to dig canals into me. I was increasingly worried about finding a gondolier guiding tourists down my back some day.

Thus one of the best decisions I ever made was to have breast reduction surgery, or as I like to say, have most of my tits chopped off. While I was glad to be getting rid of my burden, I found plastic surgery a rather farcical experience. I was met at my initial appointment by the surgeon, a short, thin man who looked me up and down with beady brown eyes. Four long hairs were combed over his bald spot. His creepy human ferret look seemed like it would be more at home stalking a used car lot for prey, and yet he spent a fair amount of time telling me that I looked awful. I then posed for diagnostic photos topless while wearing pantyhose, not only highlighting that my breasts were stretched like taffy, but that my stomach exploded over the top of pantyhose like a mushroom cloud. To say the least, it was not the most body-affirmative experience I have ever had.

The Polaroids were sent to my insurance company as proof that I had the ugliest tits in America and that they needed to pay to fix them, lest I destroy the patriotic spirit of all red-blooded American males. (This was back in the day when my plastic surgeon took on charity cases like me and accepted plastic surgery. He no longer does.) While I was not pleased to have pictures of my naked torso and fat gut being shared with God knows how many people, I also did not worry that the pictures would wind up in the wrong hands. (Playboy was not going to be contacting me any time soon unless they wanted to blow a year of their airbrushing budget on one picture.) The insurance people agreed that I endangered my own health and the nation’s love of perky breasts, and they quickly approved the procedure.

I arrived at the hospital before dawn on the day of my surgery. The doctor came into the room to prep me. While he bent over and cheerfully drew purple lines all over my breasts, I stared at the wispy hairs across the center of his head and wondered what he would do if I got a brown marker and drew in more hair on his scalp. As he finished, a plastically attractive female anesthesiologist hooked me up to an IV. They grinned wolfishly and said I would be a new person when I awoke. As I drifted off, I hoped for the best.

The end result was amazing. At my follow up appointment, the surgeon stepped back to soak in the view as if I was a block of marble and he was Michelangelo sculpting “The Pieta, then praised himself for his “work." While I did not appreciate his ego, he did do a very good job transforming my droopy saddlebag old lady breasts into adorable and lovable little handfuls. It was literally a load off my shoulders, although for weeks afterward I had no feeling in my chest, which pretty much meant that anyone could cop a feel without me noticing. This made me a little paranoid when riding on a crowded subway, and anyone who inched a bit too close to me was the recipient of a nasty glare.

It has been over seven years since the surgery, and sometimes I search the internet to see if my pre-surgery pics appear on any saggy boobs fetish sites. Fortunately, the pictures seem to remain safely locked away in a bureaucratic storage facility somewhere, hopefully never to see the light of day again. I am free to run down the street without worrying about slapping myself in the face. I could not be happier.

Suzanne also blogs at Campaign for Unshaved Snatch (CUSS) & Other Rants.