NIP / TUCK

"Tell me what you don't like about yourself..."

I had plastic surgery when I was 22.

When I was 21 I lost 113 pounds by dieting, running, and eating mostly Healthy Choice meals and drinking more water in a day than most camels in a year. Inspired by years of taunts and jeers, I finally got tired of being fat and started doing something about it.

I worked my butt off to get rid of my man-boobs. That was my number one goal, I could have cared less about having a big stomach, I just wanted a normal chest. I had already lived most of my life being made fun of for my high voice and my for being a christian and having a moral standard and as I continued to put on weight I started getting made fun of for being fat.

I worked at Boeing in Corinth and there was this one guy on my team that always told me that I needed to wear a bra. It was like high school all over again. Me being sensitive about my self image and someone picking up on that sensitivity and exploiting it. Some people seem to be able to sense weakness like an animal can sense fear and then they attack without provocation.

Long story short, I dieted to get rid of my man-boobs. I worked hard, I ran and ran and ran. The running was therapeutic. I lost weight, I felt great, but in the end I still wasn't satisfied with the results. I started looking up plastic surgeons to fix my chest. The excess skin sagged down and my chest looked better, but it still didn't look right. I probably could have waited patiently to see if the problem would have corrected itself, but I was impatient and tired and ready to be free from this burden.

I went to a plastic surgeon in Lewisville and for 3,500 dollars he removed the excess skin and did a small amount of liposuction on the remaining fat in my chest. I weighed approximately 230 pounds and I had a 34 inch waist and so I felt like I was ready to take this next step to becoming a new man.

Two painful surgeries later my chest was looking much better. I felt good about myself. I started being much more confident. The following summer I went to Kanakuk Kamps and took my shirt off when I went swimming. It felt good.

My new-found confidence helped me to overcome a lot of self-esteem issues that I had harbored over the years and soon I matured and found out who I was and that being fat or thin didn't make me - me. But it took losing weight and having the plastic surgery to realize that.

So the reason I am writing this post is because last night I was watching NIP / TUCK. It was the season finale. I haven't been able to make it through one of these shows completely because it is so violent and sometimes vulgar. However, just from the commericials it was easy to keep up with what was going on with the show. I knew there was this spooky Carver dude and I wanted to find out if the Carver was one of the Plastic Surgeons or someone else.

Turns out, The Carver was a Plastic Surgeon and a Detective - they were a brother/sister team. They were both born with physical birth defects and sent to an orphanage. Society rejected them and they were never adopoted. The brother was born without a penis and his sister was born with a face abnormailtiy. ( I thought it was interesting how they chose the two things that men and women seem to value most about their appearance) They lived their entire lives trying to fit in and hating a society that equates self-worth with beauty. They set out to destroy women who valued outward beauty, and the plastic surgeons that made them.

NIP / TUCK is a provocative show that looks at all levels of plastic surgery, but what all plastic surgery seems to boil down to is vanity. We don't like what is ugly. We don't talk about what is ugly. Instead we take the ugly, and we put a pretty face on it.

Being born with a deformity is not unbearable, being rejected for something that we have no control over is.

Disclaimer:
This post isn't about being for or against plastic surgery, it is only intended to share my experience with plastic surgery and to make people think.