Week 2 of sleeping propped up and I'm losing my mind. How long did it really take you?

#1Jade R.(Joined Mar 2025 · 18 posts)October 12, 2025, 11:52 pm

It's nearly midnight and I'm awake, again, writing this from my pillow fortress, so forgive the tone.

I'm 13 days post op. My surgeon wants me on my back, propped at an angle, for six weeks. I have been a stomach sleeper since childhood. I've got a travel pillow around my neck, a pillow under each arm and one under my knees, and I still wake up at 3am having slid down into a sad flat heap, then spend ten minutes re-engineering everything. I'm getting maybe five broken hours and I'm turning into a monster at work.

Two questions for those further along. One: any actual working setups for a committed stomach sleeper, and when could you roll onto your side without panicking? Two, unrelated but while I have you: for those well past this, when did your scars calm down? Mine are only just healed over but they're very red and I'm already fixating.

#2Natalie88(Joined Nov 2024 · 26 posts)October 13, 2025, 7:19 am

The 3am slide is such a universal experience there should be a badge for it. What fixed it for me was a proper wedge pillow instead of stacked normal pillows, the stack collapses, the wedge doesn't, plus one firm pillow under each arm so I couldn't roll. Some people just sleep in a recliner for the first weeks and honestly if I'd owned one I would have.

Side sleeping: my surgeon cleared it around week 7 and it felt like a holiday. Stomach took a lot longer before it felt okay, and by then, plot twist, I'd half converted to back sleeping anyway. You do adjust, infuriating as that is to hear at day 13.

#3sixweekspost(Joined Feb 2025 · 11 posts)October 13, 2025, 6:40 pm

Can't help on sleep (I'm a back sleeper, the one thing in this process I got for free) but scars I can do. Mine were angry red until month 4 or 5 and I fixated exactly like you're doing. Started silicone strips once my surgeon okayed them, kept the scars out of the sun, and the fading was glacial but real. At 18 months they're thin pale lines I have to point out for anyone to notice. The red stage feels permanent. It isn't.

#4Miss Charlotte VaneSurgical moderator(Joined Sep 2024 · 58 posts)October 15, 2025, 9:03 am

Jade R. said:

when could you roll onto your side without panicking?

A note from the clinical side, mostly to explain why we inflict this on you. Propped-up back sleeping in the early weeks isn't ritual: elevation helps swelling settle, and keeping pressure and sideways forces off the chest protects the implant pockets while the tissues around them are still healing and the implants are finding their position. It's temporary scaffolding for a result you'll have for years.

The timings, though, are the part I need to be firm about: they belong to your surgeon, not to this thread. Six weeks is a common instruction but protocols genuinely differ with placement, incision, and surgeon judgement, and readers here will report anything from four weeks to eight for side sleeping, all correctly following their own plans. When to reintroduce positions, and when to start any scar treatment such as silicone, are your surgeon's calls for your chest; ask at your follow-up rather than averaging the forum. The site's guides to sleeping and bras after augmentation and how scars change over the first year and beyond cover what's typical and why, and sixweekspost's description of the red stage is textbook.

The comfort tricks, wedges, arm pillows, the recliner, are fair game from the forum. Take those freely; take the dates from your own team.

#5Jade R.(Joined Mar 2025 · 18 posts)October 26, 2025, 10:30 pm

Reporting back from a WEDGE, which arrived Tuesday and has ended the 3am slide entirely. Six hours straight the last two nights, monster mostly retired. Asked my surgeon at Friday's check about side sleeping and got "we'll see at six weeks," which is exactly what this thread predicted she'd say. The scar answers genuinely talked me off a ledge, thank you both.