Dr. David Shafer in NYC Is awesome! A review, many years later.

No, I didn't rebuild my entire self like Humpty Dumpty. Yes, you thought it.

My full review of Shafer Plastic Surgery. The best kind, because it’s been so long, this means things worked magnificently.

Dr. Shafer, please don’t share a single additional detail about my treatment at all beyond confirming that I was once a patient. But please do enjoy any new patients this review sends your way! ☺️ You know me. I’m a chatterbox when I am happy. And such below, chatterbox time, for a full story behind my corrective procedure. Going to tell some of this in my own words. Some! We leave the rest to mystery.

I never intend on redoing Dr. Shafer’s revision work on my body for the rest of my life unless I have to! 2009 to 2026 is almost 17 years and counting. Can’t wait to celebrate this staying the same at the 30th anniversary, 40th, 50th, 60th, 100th… 🥳 My breasts are super lifted up and amazing to this day!

Quite a lot to discuss around this. For anyone digging up bad review dirt you’ll never find on Dr. Shafer, he hardly has any reviews. Good or bad. I felt it was time because I am a testament of how great his work literally holds up an eternity later, he is a well deserved, all around good gentleman who requires a review placed with a real name. Mine.

The Beauty TV series captured my experiences like no other drama has.

Plastic surgery makeover shows treat people like everyone is rebuilt head to toe. You get the Katie Price special, right? My experience with plastic surgery has always been, “This is horrifying. How do I fix this? Why did this happen to me?” and bursting into tears. I was that girl from Ryan Murphy’s The Beauty who saw what everyone else had in that fictional world. She got a version of The Beauty treatment, and she became a monster.

I got lip fillers when I was 18, and my whole upper lip got infected under my nose. The owner of the surgery clinic whose physician partner performed the filler and didn’t mess up on Oscar winners and “famous” people sure messed up on me, so he barely numbed me. Off on the operating table I was sent, my numbing not kicked in at all, as some of my interior lip was cut out in the process to cut out the giant infection. In other words, imagine being knifed alive in a horror film. I was prescribed multiple antibiotics and a steroid. This was the first of enough times I can count having plastic surgery redos on my upper lip elsewhere, definitely not that clinic, nice as the owner was, until I got rid of most of it. Reshaping it. Kicking out scar tissue. Redoing anything. In my 20’s, I got a final full upper lip implant where my real lip tissue used to be, wrapped around the exterior lip. Between 18 to those years later, I always felt like I was one wrong morning from waking up to find my upper lip disintegrated, with all the beads of scar tissue and lumpy lip tissue you noticed when you really looked. Dr. Shafer was not one of the amazing botched fixing doctors I saw for my lip, but mentioning this is of value because when you have any plastic surgery procedure done or fillers, you must be prepared for the what can go wrong of it. The fix might not be one more procedure. It could be years of your life and potential credit card expenses.

What Dr. Shafer Did Fix in 2009 Looks Awesome in 2026 and Counting

The British media does great public awareness for younger people with clips like this iTV This Morning piece, “I Refuse to Be Shamed For My Saggy Boobs.” The young lady interviewed said what I used to say. She wondered why she went into bra stores finding she never looked like the women on the package. I was that teenage girl too. I did somethng about it.

There was nothing really “wrong” with me. I remember being somewhat curvier when I was 15, suddenly a lot when I was 15 and a half, emphasis on the half because you look so different suddenly. Then I began expressing my views to people that I wanted to someday be successful in Hollywood as my true ultimate aspiration. I remember the girls who called me fat because everyone back then was stick skinny or “pretty” thin skinny. The woman who fit me in a costume and said, “I didn’t think your waist would be that small,” who wouldn’t explain what she meant by that when I had a music performance and had to match some of the other girls. There was the time I tried on dresses at Nordstrom in downtown Chicago and a saleslady told me I wouldn’t look good in that type of dress because I wasn’t slim enough for it. The unspoken rule in the silence spread by media and everyone you ever met that to be successful, on camera or off in that time period, you had to be skinny or thin. Definitely, always much thinner, but not too skinny where your ribs showed and you looked gross. Forced thinness. Which I began to try. I began with dieting slightly to be “attractive” thinner. When that wasn’t enough, I went for the thin, on a whirlwind mess of eating habits that weren’t bad enough to be classified eating disordered because I looked “pretty.”

Age 16, I looked “good.” Age 16.5, a little shaved off. Age 17, I was “pretty.” I had made it to thin skinny. Not skinny with bones on show. Skinny like I looked like trendy girls who got hired. The popular clique, if I’d had gone to high school in person. A good dress size.

What people in those magazines don’t tell you is, forced thinness always leads to your breasts sagging wildly, and how no gorgeous bra in any juniors department store or Victoria’s Secret is going to make you look lifted again, pushed up, or well, youthful. I was and am supposed to be that driven individual who was studying online with proper lady university education so I could transfer to UT Austin out of state and graduating early. I did freelance journalism, which impressed people with how “grown up” I was. I was obsessed with the spectacle that was The Lord of the Rings, Titanic, Indiana Jones, or any major movie that looked and felt like expensive adventures because I wanted to do that. The men who starred in, scored, directed, wrote, produced, and were all involved in those movies didn’t talk about shallow things like plastic surgery or wanting it. Why should I? Being “shallow” made me guilty and ashamed. James Cameron never went on a behind the scenes of his films chatting body image and correcting things he messed up.

And there’s no getting your breasts back once they sag. So to make a problem worse, I thought if I lost some smidge more of weight, it might help. It didn’t. All I ever wanted was to look good so I could be successful. A skinnier you means money. Money means power. Power means the range to do anything you dream of. I never signed up for the consequences that my chest would look horrible and never rebound. It wasn’t like I was a 45 year old man going in for crowns knowing there is no going back. Young women were never warned, “Hey, I’m an actress who dropped some dress sizes to be a star. I had to get plastic surgery because of what that did to me.”

I was 17 years old when I first met with a plastic surgeon to fix my breast situation. He was a very nice man who made me laugh and met with me and my family member working as a legal guardian after my checkup. Some of it was asking me questions about mental health and how I was with school and my work goals. I told him about how I would soon be starting at my new university with my transfer credits. He informed me that I had to wait until I was 18, but the moment I was 18, I could do it. Looking back, I understand and agree that this was probably the right thing to do. General anesthesia without being in a hospital setting if anything happened scared me, but I wanted it so badly. The doctor reassured me nothing would go wrong. I trusted him.

When I was 18 going to school, I always stuffed some chicken cutlets in to lift things up and look “pretty” in normal clothes or anything. As I was in Texas far away from negative influences lurking beneath the great ones out of town, I also began trying to eat right and work out so I would have more body confidence and improve the way things looked. Being normal talking to normal kids my age on campus felt good. To say it was an insecurity nobody understands until you deal with that, I don’t know how else to say it. People notice things when they meet you. Being an 18 year old when you’re supposed to be in the prime of your life and look dreadful in clothes, at least bras, basic dresses, and swimwear, to your own eyes from a self inflicted decision? You’re supposed to have a perky chest, according to the world. Look your best you’ve ever looked.

When I was able to some months later, I had my first breast fix with that nice surgeon I mentioned. He did a great job medically, and not aesthetically. When I saw what I looked like, it looked like it wouldn’t last. “I made you look natural,” he said, happily. A little too natural. Months later, things began sagging. Sticky pads or chicken cutlets solved it. it was better than the before, until it wasn’t. Years later, I was 21 with saggy breasts I didn’t want anyone to know were saggy. I remember meeting with the lady who owned the first modelling agency I was with. She asked me after signing me to remove my chicken cutlets then laughed at me so hard, saying I needed to get that fixed, like it were a funny comedy club routine. I already wanted to fix it without that mockery. Her input was unnecessary and inappropriate. But seeing her poorly windblown face, I ought to have taken it with a grain of salt.

Back in went the chicken cutlets and stickers as my regular wardrobe friends.

When I was in NYC, it didn’t help that eating the way I wanted and being fit were not on her agenda. I was told I couldn’t work out as I wanted. Be healthy or normal, which was what earning me compliments in the first place from everyday people who thought I would make a great actress or model. One woman of many who tried and failed getting me a top agency was a woman who managed a major department store. She couldn’t understand why the agent she sent me to supplying all of her store’s models would reject someone who looked healthy and happy to model fine necklaces, makeup, hair, and all of the wonderful world of things that don’t require heroin chic runway looks.

It didn’t help that eating meatless American food in NYC is a task and was worse then. Not Chinese tofu all day long, breakfast, lunch, dinner. I can’t stuff my face with the same fave Szechuan eggplant each meal! For me to have decent meatless food when I’ve been in NYC, I have to make it myself or head to any of the restaurants where I have personal relationships with the restaurant owner and/or management. I’ll get custom orders made just for me, using me as a guinea pig of picky eaters who don’t eat meat in return. When I’m not near those restaurants or unwilling to eat out, it’s steak, lamb, chicken, pork, ahhhhhhh all to me at once. Help. That doesn’t do you much good when you need to eat right for your mind and physical body.

Dieting down, but not to the extent of before, hid some of the breast situation, a little bit. Never well. Never confidently. All right, you win. It was the same thing 2.0., but less fashionably “skinny” when, ironically, I was a repped agency model. The thing about doing this is, you’re told this is the secret to “making it.” You will be “pretty.” Everyone else does it. Boys, girls, young men, young women, mature men, mature women, now that we have words for other genders, nonbinary people. All of us who ever wanted to get work and strike it big. You see people who aren’t on camera and in the arts or fashion, they’re all doing it. If it works so well, why are there millions of model slash actors waiting tables in major cities around the globe? Because it doesn’t.

So one day, I found Dr. Shafer in an article when I was browsing Duane Reade magazines as I was often for fun little shopping. I got in touch with him. He was great, so I went in person, walking. Elaine was a super nice lady who ran his office and made me feel safe. She came in the room because under New York law, you have to have a woman in the room if you are a female patient. The rest of the first consult itself, clothed, was pretty easy and thorough. Dr. Shafer heavily goes over everything you want in detail. I talked about things like the weird scar tissue on the left that made my chest hurt when I laid back in a chair as I used to dye my hair black at hair salons in that time. How the entire right breast sagged horribly more than the left, and it was like a lesser look of what I had before my first breast surgery. All I wanted. My concern how crazily, the first time, the nice surgeon who was personable but not on the same page, made the poor judgment of trying to separate me when I’m not naturally built like that. And a lot. A LOT. I’d rather not get into it. As I said, I’m still embarrassed to be sharing this, and only do it 1) because people must know how amazing Dr. Shafer is and 2) people need to read about the hit your breasts get when you diet down. You will need some sort of plastic surgery to fix them if you go below your body’s stable weight.

I went over to the hospital(!) where I had multiple anesthesiologists and nurses caring for me. Being wheeled into the surgery room was terrifying because it looked like a movie alien kidnapping from my point of view without contact lenses on. General anesthesia again! Anything I’ve ever had done outside of the first breast surgery was under local while awake. I broke my chin as a kid and had it stitched up awake. Lip, lip, lip, all awake. It went by really fast, and I recall waking up groggy to Dr. Shafer saying he removed that ugly wad of scar tissue inside and whatever was going on. He was blurry.

I rode home in a hired car just a few blocks south. Bump. OUCH! Bump. Every time the driver smoothly went over a bump, I felt it. I sat home and watched TV. The next morning, after a cautious shower with my chest all exposed literally, I got dressed and discreetly took a slow walk to…uh, Equinox nearby. 🫠 And slowly, very slowly, walked on a treadmill because I was paranoid of my blood flow. I’m sorry, Dr. Shafer. Some Equinox staffers who knew me casually said hi to me, not thinking twice. I lied I was “sick” with a little bug and needed a slow walk to feel better. Feel better, I did. My bandaged chest passed the test! Nobody looked down wondering what was wrong with me! Most of the time, I hung out at home or sat around restaurants where people knew me.

Things healed really quickly. I had to go in for checkups. Nothing looked or felt “off” this time. Dr. Shafer did call me out on wearing the wrong bra band, in a conversation I recall a little, and I was silly about it. We were having a conversation about finally getting bras now that I looked pretty in a normal way. I had some back massages sitting up in a chair at a nearby hotel nail salon where the owner was so kind regularly to everyone I knew, because my chest didn’t feel so bad. My back was extremely OWWWW on and off for a few weeks.

In full disclosure, looking the way I wanted made me take better care of myself. I went full ahead on eating right and working out better, as I wanted, no outside forces involved. Forget them. I was in some time, back to resembling a superior edition of my body type, because now I was held up in place, everything just right. Gaining some weight in a healthy amount made my head to toe entirety look really good.

Then, and now, I’m always “mummified.” When I told a friend about this, she thought I meant a Halloween costume, and I explained, I meant wearing a good sports bra at all times under most clothes. Never braless. Never in flimsy outfits. When I make exceptions for normal bras or bralettes, it’s done with great fitting materials, and back into the sports bra later. This may very well be the reason my results look like my surgery was performed last week. My personal opinion. Everything flows. It’s like I am my old me again, but better.

This was done for me to look good in normal clothes. Not self conscious. Not wearing revealing clothes every morning like a reality TV star. If in tighter or more “on camera” looks for casual time or actual on camera someday, looking good will be a great feeling. I want to beat “30+ is old for leads” ageism and be on camera in my own adventure and action films like Keanu Reeves does as John Wick and Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. You might, or might not, notice how great my chest area looks then. I used to not want to talk about this until later because I didn’t want people staring at this part of me in a weird way, or that part of me overshadowing any current and future achievements of mine. Thinking about how everyone who knows me is going to start knowing this.

No, going quiet is doing a disservice to people who think that everything will be OK with restricting yourself because celebrities do it and wind up “fine.” Or now, you might toss influencers into that sentence after the word celebrities. Classmates. Friends. “Fine,” as in a good surgery or handful more fixing the damage caused by unnatural weight loss they claim is their natural body shapes melting off as their success rose.

Getting anything fixed isn’t only for Real Housewives who want every inch of them rebuilt from the ground up. Often, it’s that one thing bothering you that makes you feel better forever. Nobody talks about this. Allow me, I said, on my next Substack entry.

Dr. Shafer has to be the most underrated plastic surgeon of LA and NYC. I went to Dr. [BEEEP]’s office, name redacted in Kill Bill flair, as a consult before booking with Dr. Shafer. A swanky spot where everyone is said to go. I met some major male movie stars there in the waiting room who were humble and gave me wacky SNL sketch excuses as to why they wanted their faces rebuilt. It’s OK. You want it. You don’t owe me any explanations!

They told me Dr. [BEEEP]’s partner was going to perform the surgery. I met some friendly ladies who weren’t nurses, who weren’t listening to one thing I said, jotting down notes of things I never said I wanted. I would meet the surgeon five minutes before the surgery. Seriously!? The star treatment there was for the men and women in the waiting room. Not all patients were equal.

Calling around, nobody gave me the time of the day. I was one of many. Making the same mistake twice of being a fast food hamburger in surgery wasn’t on my agenda.

Dr. Shafer treats every paying customer equally. He never questioned how my IMDb page was doing. Everything was technical, to the point, cheery, helpful. He spends lots of time getting to what you want so you won’t have a redo on a redo. I cannot say enough nice things about him and his total experience. His attitude is really similar to the Matty character in 13 Going on 30. Optimistic, cheerful, you feel like you can tell him anything. That is exactly what you want in your doctor, because talking about your dislikes of your body anatomy is so humiliating. I always tell people who know me well, if ever I want anything done again, I will fly to see Dr. Shafer wherever he is in the world before going to a local plastic surgeon. With my oily skin and circle face, I hope that’s never, but hey! I know I will be in a good position if I do.