“Nothing was wrong with it. I had simply stopped being the person who chose it.”
Mara came to the Boston center for a revision she describes as entirely unnecessary, which is roughly how her specialist described it back to her. Her original system was placed nine years earlier, had never given her a day of trouble, and was a decorative gold pair with a fairly ornate engraved field that she had chosen at thirty-one and had been quietly tired of since about thirty-six.
She says the first appointment was largely spent establishing that there was no clinical reason to proceed and no clinical reason not to. Her specialist was explicit that revision carries real recovery for a result nobody but Mara would notice, and equally explicit that preferring a different surface after nine years is a legitimate reason to want one. Mara found the second half of that sentence harder to believe than the first.
Planning took one further visit. She moved to a low-profile steel system in a plain satin finish — no engraving, no ornament, nothing to look at. Her Design Specialist showed her the gold pair alongside the proposed steel and asked her to sit with both for a fortnight before confirming, which she did, and which she says she resented at the time and was grateful for afterwards.
She keeps the original plates in a drawer. “I thought I would feel something about retiring them and I did not,” she says. “Which I think was the answer. If I had felt something I would still be wearing them.”
Individual results and experiences vary. Accounts are published with the participant’s permission, reviewed with them before publication and withdrawn at their request. Names appear as a first name and last initial.