Day 12 and I cried in a supermarket queue over nothing at all. Does everyone get this flat weepy stage after augmentation?

#1meglifts(Joined Apr 2026 · 12 posts)August 11, 2026, 9:38 pm

I need to say this somewhere that isn't my group chat, because in real life I've told everyone I'm doing great.

Physically I am doing great. Barely any pain now, wounds fine, surgeon happy at my week 1 check. And yet I've spent the last four days feeling completely flat, snapping at my boyfriend for breathing, and today I stood in a supermarket queue and started crying because they'd stopped doing the yoghurt I like. The YOGHURT.

Underneath it there's this horrible loop of what have I done, I've had healthy body parts operated on for vanity, and I look strange and high and swollen and I've done this to myself on purpose. Week one I was fine, I was medicated and my mum was here and it felt like an event. This week everyone's gone back to work and it's just me and a mirror and no gym for another month.

Is this a thing or am I actually regretting it and dressing it up?

#2Jade R.(Joined Mar 2025 · 18 posts)August 12, 2026, 7:14 am

It's a thing. It's such a thing that I'd almost say week two is a recognised stage of this, right alongside the sleeping misery.

Look at what's stacked on you at once: two weeks of broken sleep on your back, coming off the stronger painkillers, an anaesthetic your body is still clearing, no exercise, no lifting, no routine, no visitors, and a chest that looks nothing like the thing you signed up for because it's swollen and sitting high. Any one of those would flatten a person. You've got all of them.

Mine lifted in week three, roughly when I was allowed to walk properly again. Nothing about my results had changed by then. My circumstances had.

#3EmmaLouise31(Joined Jan 2026 · 22 posts)August 12, 2026, 12:49 pm

The vanity loop got me too and it's worth saying plainly: you did not do something shameful, and your body doesn't know or care that the surgery was elective. It's had an operation and it's responding like it's had an operation.

Also, the crying-at-nothing thing is such a reliable marker that when a friend of mine had hers I texted her on day 11 to say "you're allowed to cry today" and she rang me sobbing about a television advert.

#4Claire AshleyAdmin(Joined Aug 2024 · 231 posts)August 13, 2026, 9:52 am

Meg, this is one of the most common things people write to me about privately, and one of the least discussed publicly, which is a rotten combination when you're in the middle of it.

Mine landed at day eleven. I cried in a kitchen because the kettle was too heavy to lift, and then cried harder because I was crying about a kettle. What I couldn't see at the time, and what I'd want you to hold onto, is that the low stretch tracks your physical recovery rather than your result. It lifts when you start sleeping, when you get outside, when you're allowed to move, when you stop being a patient. That's usually weeks before the mirror gives you anything reassuring, which is exactly why the fortnight feels like a verdict when it isn't one.

The way I'd separate blues from regret, and it's the only reliable way I know: time. The dip fades as you feel physically like yourself again. Real regret is steady, specific, and it's still there when you're well. Almost nobody can tell the difference at day 12, so please don't try to. There's a whole guide on this now, the emotional dip in the first weeks, written mostly because so many of you have described this to me, and it sits alongside the week-by-week recovery picture.

One thing I would take seriously rather than ride out: if it keeps deepening instead of easing, if it's still there in a couple of weeks, or if you feel hopeless, that's a GP conversation and not a forum one. And anything physical that's feeding the worry, pain getting worse, a temperature, one side changing, ring your surgeon's team the same day.

#5sixweekspost(Joined Feb 2025 · 19 posts)August 14, 2026, 6:20 pm

Practical things that helped me more than they should have: getting dressed properly every day, a short flat walk each morning even when I didn't want one, and deleting the app I'd been using to look at other people's results. That last one did about half the work on its own.

#6meglifts(Joined Apr 2026 · 12 posts)August 28, 2026, 8:33 pm

Week 4 and I'm a different person. Sleeping on my side, cleared for walking properly, back at work, and the flatness went almost exactly when the restrictions did, just like Jade said it would.

Told my boyfriend about this thread and he said "so it wasn't the yoghurt", which is now a running joke in this house. Leaving this here for whoever finds it at day 12 at 1am. It passes, and it isn't the same as regret.