Surgical bra is so tight that I'm about to lose my mind!!!!

Here's what happened:

Shortly after I posted this message, I had my husband hook me into the Soma sports bra and positioned myself on my bed in a comfortable seated nest and dozed through an hour of TV. When I got up, a miracle had occurred. My back spasms vanished and the intense pressure & discomfort at the base of the bra was merely mildly annoying! So what did I do? I experienced a full-blown anxiety attack - the worst that I've ever had. It wasn't pretty. It also made sense - I had put so much energy into staying in the surgical bra regardless of the discomfort that once I the stress was removed, the underlying anxiety broke through.

I calmed down and put a call in to the plastic surgeon. I was on hold for almost 20 minutes before a human picked up (major university hospital in the midst of a pandemic). She was amazingly calming and paged the on-call plastic surgeon. When he called me back, he was immediately reassuring that I was not endangering my outcome by abandoning the surgical bra at 10 days post-surgery and that the most important thing for recovery at this point was that I should be comfortable. He concurred that I my surgical bra was likely too small. His take was that if I'm not experiencing major swelling at this point then the extra compression of any surgical bra was not necessary.

I feel much better today. I got up and walked about a mile at my normal pace and then walked another mile with my husband at his slower pace. I'm going to try to do an online order for some front closure sports bras.

Some takeaways for anyone reading this thread:

Having surgery during a pandemic is going to present unique challenges - scheduled on less than 24 hours notice, no opportunity to review recovery instructions, surgeon never came to recovery to check on me, pushed to get dressed and leave recovery as soon as possible etc, no followup call from surgeon staff to see how I was doing (same hospital would call after routine colonoscopy in normal times). Most importantly, the normal followup appointment is scheduled for 1 week post-surgery and mine will be 2 !/2 weeks if they don't decide to cancel it. A lot of uncertainty.

I let myself be bullied. The importance of wearing the surgical bra was the only thing that the plastic surgeon stressed in his brief pre-surgical conversation as I stood with my torso exposed as he drew the lines to mark for the intended surgery. The plastic surgeon as also made it clear to and to my husband in a brief post-surgery phone call that portal messages (email) were the preferred form of contact and that anything urgent was a 911 call. Did not feel any love and support. I recall hearing his words to the effect that this was a routine procedure and I was going to do well. If it's so routine, why would I even have to consider the possibility that they would put me in a too small bra??? If you're reading this, don't let yourself be bullied!