Hey, Doll! Thank you so much for taking the time to learn about me. It’s my personal obligation to learn more about you, so I appreciate your curiosity…
I guess I should start by saying that I’ve had more surgeries in my lifetime than I can count. As someone who is consistently and almost inevitably prone to every complication in the book, I’ve grown up in hospitals. I learned about intricate medical processes and procedures far too young. I grew up listening to my mother have conversations on the phone with insurance companies, doctors, and clinical coordinators. My first surgery was at a mere 4 years old. I had a blockage in my kidney that prevented my bladder from fully emptying. The surgery was a success, but the next hospital stay came quickly. At 9, I fell off my bike and wasn’t wearing a helmet which resulted in a fractured skull and blood clots between my brain and skull. After being monitored in the ICU for what felt like eternities combined, I was given a clean bill of health with some major precautions as I integrated back into a “normal” childhood. At 14 years old, the 3rd and 4th toe bones in my left foot were lengthened with external pins. This entire procedure consisted of over 5 surgeries, infection after infection, and even required a bone-graft from my hip. At 17, I underwent the same procedure but this time on my right foot. This also required multiple surgeries, due to multiple infections, and also required a bone-graft from the same hip. The procedure at the time was so rare that my surgeon was published in medical text books for having performed it. I spent most of my middle school and high school years either in the hospital, under anesthesia, recovering from surgery, on pain meds, or tending to infections, incisions, scars, and all that comes with them. When I was 22 I had a septoplasty (not a rhinoplasty-a rhinoplasty is the cosmetic correction of the aesthetics of the nose, where a septoplasty is internal). I was getting recurring sinus infections, and constantly sick. Sore throats and infections of the nasal cavity led me to this decision. It was one hell of an experience, but I have been sinusitis-free ever since!
I entered the cosmetic surgery community in 2014 when I first started researching breast augmentation (BA). For research purposes, support, and education, I joined private Facebook groups dedicated to BA’s, and followed personal Instagram pages of Dolls who had been willing to share their BA journey. I fell in love with the work of Dr. Kourosh Tavakoli of Sydney, Australia, who operates on Dolls with extreme deformities. I have a mild case of Tuberous Breasts, so I was enthralled with his work. That mild diagnosis, combined with a surgical goal that I’ve yet to find achievable by a doctor in the US, has proven it difficult to find a surgeon that I’m comfortable with. A bit more insight to my body and why I thought implants would help? I’ve always had a boxy square midsection and a flat booty. Add some scoliosis and uneven hips to the mix and I was so ashamed of my shape that I couldn’t stand to look at myself in the mirror. As a woman, our weight naturally fluctuates, but I’ve been as heavy as 180, and as light as 115. I’m 5’4. You can imagine the difference 80 lbs has on a semi-short frame. No amount of exercise, and no combination of work-outs could shape my waist and butt to a desirable silhouette. I was hoping increasing my sad A-cup breasts would fix this…even if just a little bit. From 2014-2019 I consulted with many US based breast augmentation surgeons, willing to wait for the “right one”. I knew deep down that I didn’t want to settle quickly, at the risk of potentially being unhappy with the results and having to live with that decision for the next 50+ years. I thank my Higher Power that I waited.
Enter the BBL – Brazilian Butt Lift:
In June of 2019, I saw a woman post about her Brazilian Butt Lift (BBL) experience in the aforementioned private Facebook group, and I was enthralled. BBL = Lipo360+Fat Transfer. Lipo360 is basically a fancy way of saying liposuction from the bra-strap to the hips, 360 degrees around the trunk of the body. The fat transfer is, of course, to the butt and hips. Smaller waist, fatter booty. I didn’t even know this procedure existed! Only looking quickly, I could tell this surgery would solve several of the issues in my body that I was unhappy with. I started digging like a rat for cheese. Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, you name it. I looked up everyone and anyone that was willing to share their experience around this ‘taboo’ procedure. In one popular Dolls’ YouTube video, she explained that she joined a cosmetic surgery community (if you know, you know!) and there she was able to learn more about other Dolls’ surgery journeys.
I decided to join the community too. After looking around for a few days, I knew this was something I had to do – for myself. It wasn’t a matter of if anymore, it was a matter of when. I scoured doctors’ portfolios and social media pages. I reached out to women who were open about their surgeries and DM’ed them to ask them about their experience. I studied their before-and-after photos. I very rarely came across a woman who had a similar body type to mine pre-op, and even more rarely found anyone who had a similar pre-op body to mine and post-op results that I wanted. I searched daily for weeks on end. Still, no one doctor in particular won me over.
I came across the instagram page of MIA Aesthetics in Miami, FL, and began looking through their doctors individual pages. Dr. Mehio’s work instantly caught my eye. My own disproportionate body was so vividly burned into my mind’s eye that I was able to quickly pick out all the bodies in his portfolio that looked just like mine. It didn’t even matter to me how tall they were or how much they weighed. I knew enough about the basics of the procedure to know that it was a sculpting one, and that if he could get those bodies’ aesthetics to change that drastically, then he was the doctor for me. I spent the following days diving head first into MIA Aesthetics website, and debating submitting an inquiry. I pulled the trigger less than a week later.
It took me a really long time to hear back from them. About 3 weeks after I submitted my initial inquiry, I received an email requesting my pre-op body photos and was asked to submit a small questionnaire. After submitting those two pieces, it took several weeks again for correspondence from MIA Aesthetics before I was granted the option to put down a deposit and secure a date. In the meantime, I lived and breathed BBL research. I prepared myself by following as many post-op patients as I could, to expose myself to as much vast experience as possible. It was clear right away that this procedure was going to require a long and committed recovery, and I was ready to do just that.
I spent all of August of 2019 planning out my recovery. From what I’d seen so far, it looked like it was going to need:
- 1 month off work
- 3 months before seeing final results
- 6 months before I’d be beach body ready
I lived in NYC at the time. The commute back and forth from home to work was hard enough on someone who didn’t just undergo a major traumatic surgery, so I knew I’d want to plan for as much time off as I could get. I was lucky enough to have incredible flexibility at my 9-5. I also knew I had some time off work between the major December holidays (Christmas and New Years’ Eve), so if I could plan for a December surgery, use some sick days before the holiday, and possibly ask to work from home for a few weeks after the procedure, I’d be golden. I took the chance at asking my boss, and received the green light. (NOTE: I did not tell them I was having plastic surgery, but I did tell them that that the procedure was elective and would require extensive recovery time. I was given the okay to work from home afterward for a few weeks.)
The day before my birthday in 2019, September 23, I put down my deposit and booked my date. I’d have surgery with Dr. Mehio in Miami on December 12, 2019.
Shit’s Getting Real
Ohmygod what have I done? I just put down a large sum of money on a major life-altering procedure. So many things were going through my head:
This was the wrong decision.
I’m not telling my family about this, they’ll never accept it.
What if I don’t wake up?
What if my mother finds out I went in for plastic surgery and never came out alive?
It was incredibly hard to push those thoughts out of my mind, but this is where the support of other Dolls came into play, and this is where I was able to pull from the surgery community for experience, strength, and hope. I started to see the beauty in the community, from Dolls sharing posts about going in for surgery that morning, and expressing fear, anxiety, and worry… to living to tell the tale and posting about their recovery from that day forward.
Even with all of the information that people were sharing throughout their process, I still never found anyone that gave a step-by-step instructional and educational approach to their recovery. I didn’t expect them to, of course. But there was an incredible need for it, and a major opportunity for someone to do so. Even in the preparation phase, I saw gaps where being detailed, specific, and as comprehensive as possible about each step of the process was sorely lacking.
The BBL Encyclopedia Was Born
From that day, I vowed to document every single aspect of my journey. My nearly 20-year professional career requires me to be hyper-organized and obsessively attentive to seemingly small yet critical details. I have years of experience in managing calendars, data, and day-to-day operations of businesses within Fortune 500 Companies. This experience would serve me well, but not only me: the Surgery Sisters I would meet along the way. I was aware of the things that confused me the most, and took note of the things that other Dolls were confused by. As I began to engage, prepare, and plan, I started using an instagram account dedicated solely to the documentation of my BBL Journey. I was here to begin training on what I would need to do for my mind, body, and soul in order to come out of this surgery successfully. @miadoll_in_training. Perfect.
Months into organizing my IG page based on my experiences, a sister DM’ed me one day and thanked me for the detailed information, she was prepping for her own surgery. She jokingly made a comment that my page was “literally the BBL Encyclopedia”, and from there the idea stuck. It happened organically, and couldn’t have been planned better if I tried.
NOTE: Dolls In Training now has it’s own IG page at @dolls_in_training, so please follow!
Speaking of challenges… my experience in the surgery community has shown me that post-op dolls come up against multiple challenges throughout this very long journey. Not only do we have to worry about our physical and mental health and wellbeing, we sometimes face difficulties through circumstances out of our control. Most of the bumps in the road of my post-op journey came up in trying to schedule the appointments and order the products that were so critical to my aftercare plan. I needed to remind myself that I was dealing with other people who were providing a service. It’s important to remember that these people are fallible humans. The cosmetic surgery world, up until recently, has been a somewhat underground and controversial one. The businesses that have been birthed as a result of post-op care needs are, for the most part, relatively new and learning how to evolve and keep up with the demand as the demand increases.
I quickly realized that no part of this process is easy. If I kept my expectations in line with reality, then my level of peace would be high. By the time I had my BBL, I knew enough about physical health and healing to know that my mental state had a direct affect on my physical healing. Instead of living in a state of constant resentment and frustration over the challenges I faced during both my preparation phase and recovery phase during my journey, my thinking process quickly evolved to:
- Expect people to miscommunicate regarding appointments, documents, approvals, requirements, etc.
- Expect directions, information, or confirmations to be misread, misheard, or missed completely.
- Expect a coordinator or an aftercare professional to be human and have feelings and emotions that may not match up with mine at any given moment in time.
- Expect service and/or products to be subpar.
- Expect to need to shop around until you’re able to find services or products that you’re happy with or that meet your needs.
As a community, we do our best to ask the sisters who have walked this path before us about the things they did, and the things they avoided. Insight to the products or services they used and maybe even more importantly the products or services they stayed away from. We do our best to provide reviews to future sisters who are planning to walk this path after us. My mission through this site is to voice my experience in such a way that provides you with not only an insight to my journey, but the ability to expect things that you may not have considered before finding Dolls in Training.
I want to thank you, sister, for trusting me as a source of preparation on YOUR journey.
I want to thank you, sister, for walking with me side by side. Most importantly,
I want to thank you, sister, for investing in yourself.
xoxo
J
💞
