Where's the easy button?

Went to the PT, her verdict is that I have no diastasis. Hmmmm. Now what?

She gets that I want the surgery to remove the skin, her best suggestion for that was an herbal wrap that is supposed to rid your body of excess skin and break up the fat molecules...I think I'll save my money. But she told me to tell the surgeon not to touch my abs.

In my mind though, if my muscles are in fact back together, and just stretched out, if I have the excess skin removed to fit the stretched out muscles and then flatten my belly naturally, won't I then be left with stretched out skin AGAIN?

I don't know. On one hand, I want to go in to surgery, have them chop away as much of me as they can and then deal with the recovery afterwards, and on the other hand I want to approach surgery in a healthy and least-invasive way.

I've got 2.5 weeks until surgery and I scheduled another visit with a different surgeon for a second opinion. Let's hope this doesn't leave me with my head spinning as it is now.

3 weeks to go...

Tomorrow I have an appt. with the physical therapist I worked with 1.5 years ago in the effort to reconnect my transverse muscles. She will most likely try to talk me out of the surgery by talks of physical therapy and exercise being the only true way to work on my core muscles. Surgery is not a "fix." I am meeting with her in the hopes that she'll write a letter to my insurance company recommending surgery in the hopes that they will help cover part of the $7000 it will cost to have these muscles sewn back together. When I first reached out to her for a letter she let me know she would like to assess my muscles before recommending surgery and that she thought there might be things we could do to get my muscles to start contracting again. This sent me reeling into a state of questioning myself, this surgery, and my entire situation.

I have started using an online calorie tracker to help me lose the last of the weight. It has me eating approx. 1060 calories/day (net), meaning it adds on calories when I exercise and taking away calories depending on what I eat. I have lost 4 lbs. in the past 2.5 weeks. I'm looking better. My belly does not poke out as far, and if I flex it, it is almost flat. Unless you take into consideration the deflated balloon appearance, then it still looks likes mountains and valleys that have gone through a hail storm.

My mind has turned into somewhat of a pendulum, swinging back and forth from wanting the surgery, to being pretty against it. Questions that hammer me: will I dis-respect myself afterwards for trying to attain social norms? Is that all that I'm doing? Do I think I will be worth more when my belly is flat? Will I die from infection? If I did die, will my boys blame themselves for my death and would Chris be firm enough to help them know that it was not because of them? Would I be happy with this belly, working on it for a lifetime, and knowing that whatever achievements I made would have been hard won?

Then, on the days I want the surgery, I tell myself I am completely over thinking this.

The main reason I would like to have this surgery is to feel sexy again. That's it. There are plenty of things that feed into that...I want to feel sexy while I have sex would be on the top of that list. I would like to work out and have it show, I remember that feeling good. I want to want to work out as the feeling after a good run was always something I loved. I do not love running when my belly flops all over my running shorts.

I think feeling sexy would contribute to our marriage in plenty of obvious ways, and hundreds of little subtle ways, and when I say it like that, it makes all the sense in the world to go lie under the knife ASAP.