R58 Thank you for sharing that! It makes me feel a little less weird to know someone else has done it.
My gynecomastia bothered me A LOT, and I dressed every day in such a way as to try to conceal the swelling. My left breast was very significantly larger than the right, with much more glandular breast tissue.
I think one of the reasons it upset me so much was that it seemed to have happened almost overnight during the pandemic lockdown. I just noticed one day that my breast was SO much bigger, and I had lost about 15 pounds at the time and it really stood out as looking like a boob, and the other one did too but to a lesser extent. I saw my doctor and she was alarmed and worried it could possibly be inflammatory breast cancer because of how quickly it happened and because one was so much larger than the other.
On top of all that, it ached about 50 percent of the time and it flopped around, and just annoyed me physically. So the vanity plus discomfort but I guess emotional trauma of how it 'sprouted' made me so conscious of it that I just desperately wanted a less freaky body.
I do have nipple sensation as of now but it is unfortunately pain and itching.
I had a lot of fat in my breasts, as well as glandular tissue, which surprised the surgeon. I look relatively thin, especially for a middle-aged man, and she said she was surprised how much fat she was able to take both from my breasts and my abdomen.
She has told me all the pain and discomfort and swelling are completely normal, including the total randomness of them. Pretty much everything I have read and videos I have seen from other doctors say the same. I was initially worried that my left side is so swollen and the right is not but a lot of doctors' advisory materials specifically tell patients that the body heals asymmetrically and this will probably happen and they should not freak out. I wish my doctor had told me this before I found out myself.
I didn't jerk off for over a week because I was not supposed to lift or reach at all and I figured the action of jerking could affect my upper body, so I would not risk that. Nevertheless, the night of the surgery, I went to pee and my penis was literally the color of an eggplant and my balls were black-black. I freaked out.
As you said, and as I now have read and seen in videos from many surgeons, the easiest and most comfortable and painless day is the 24 hours after surgery. There are reasons for that: 1) during the surgery, a fluid is injected throughout yoir tissue as part of the lipo process, and the fluid is a solution mixed with lidocaine, which numbs all that tissue for 24 hours or longer; 2) nerves are damaged by the lipo and they only itch and burn days later as they begin to reconnect and repair themselves; 3) inflammation begins 24+ hours after the shock of the surgical procedure, and inflammation causes a lot of the discomfort.
In total, I paid $12,000. The gynecomastia surgery was around $8k, the lipo $3k and the anesthesia $1,200, I think.
That said, the first person I met with told me "we're not the cheapest" for gynecomastia surgery, but the surgeon specializes in breast aesthetics, and my longtime psychiatrist knows both her and the anesthesiologist and vouched for their abilities and bedside manners and reputations among doctors; they work together at the VA hospital, where the surgeon does reconstructive surgeries on injured veterans and active-duty military officers.