A Little About Me!

     This Blog is for all the WOMEN out there who have Pectus Excavatum.  P.E (meaning hollowed chest) is the most common congenital deformity of the anterior wall of the chest, in which several ribs and the sternum grow abnormally. This produces a caved-in or sunken appearance of the chest.  It can either be present at birth or not develop until puberty. I hope to answer questions, give advice from my own personal experience and help all the women with this deformity feel beautiful and LOVE your body for how it is.

                                                            

     My name is Tara Fox, I am 26 years old and I have Pectus Excavatum.  I started noticing my chest indenting when i was in Junior High and it has progressively gotten worse since.  I always thought that it was just something that I was born with, I was the only one who had it, and that there wasn't anything that could be done about it.  When i was 23, I was working out in my basement, and after one of the exercises I just couldn't catch my breath, it was like I couldn't take a deep enough breath to get the oxygen I needed, I tried to sit down and that is when I passed out.  I knew this could not be good and so that is when I really started to do my research on P.E. and realized that what I had was a condition called Pectus Excavatum and that other people had it and it could possibly be fixed.

     In doing my research I have found that this condition is mostly in males and very few women.  In fact I was only able to find 3 women on youtube.com that had it.  This was hard because I needed advice from people with experience and I didn't have it.  Having P.E. as a women takes a toll on your self esteem, bras don't fit correctly, even if you have a decent cup size nobody can tell because it is sunken in.  Wearing swim suits for me was just a nightmare, especially when you come out of the water and your suit sticks to you and shows off your indent.  I never wanted to wear low cut shirts or anything that would show off my dent.  At the time that I was researching P.E. I was dating my soon to be husband Scott :) and I was so embarrassed just thinking about him seeing my chest that I really wanted to do whatever I could to fix it.  I know it sounds silly but like I said this condition really hit my self esteem hard.  So i started looking for ways to get this fixed so that  I could feel comfortable and beautiful for myself and my future husband.  I found that there are 2 surgical procedures, the Ravitch and the Nuss, or you can try physical therapy which didn't have a very high success rate.  The Ravitch procedure seemed a little too intense for me, they have to open your chest up and physically remove all of the cartilage connecting your ribs and sternum and then put a metal plate in there until it grows back.  Then you had to deal with the gnarly scar that it left across your whole chest.  In my head I thought that there were just too many things that would fix one problem but then cause another.  As I researched the Nuss procedure it seemed like this one was a surgery that I could handle better.

     The Nuss procedure is a minimally-invasive surgery (that does not mean it isn't painful!) through which two small incisions are made in the side of the chest, then a concave stainless steel bar is slipped under the sternum through the incisions in the side of the chest (it is kind of like a long steel nail file) The bar is then flipped, and the sternum pops out.  After speaking to my doctor and doing a lot of tests I decided to have this procedure done.  I will write more about my procedure in my next post.