A decade later, the Blairgowrie woman is a mum-of-two but says that she can’t get the surgery she wants on the NHS because her BMI is 35 and she’s been told it needs to be 27 for her to get the green light.
As such she’s launched a GoFundMe to raise money so she can get the procedure done privately.
“I think I’ve got some of the biggest boobs in Britain. I’m a size 36M,” Melissa said.
“I can’t pick up my daughter and that’s heartbreaking. I want to be able to play with her and pick her up.
“If I’m cleaning, I have to take a break until I’m out of pain. In the morning, I can’t do anything until I’ve done my back stretches.
“I’ve got a picture of me when I’m 18 when I was a size 6 or an 8 and it looks like I paid to have these fake boobs.”
At one point, she stood on the scales and asked her husband to hold her breasts, then saw that ‘two-and-a-half stone came off the weight’.
In the past, she’s tried things like physiotherapy but nothing has worked to relieve the pain.
Given that she says her BMI is too high for the NHS to give her breast reduction surgery, she said that she ‘can’t go to the gym’ as the pain is too much for her to exercise to lose weight.
Melissa said: “They did say I could try the weight loss jabs, but two people in my family were on them. One had to have her gallstones out and one was left feeling sick after eating anything. I just don’t want to feel like that.
“The bras in my size are £82 – which I can’t afford – so I have to get a smaller size and it’s still £20 a bra. And I’ve had to come off the naproxen they gave me as it was making me quite spacey.”
Melissa says that she got a private consultation in 2022 who have told her they could give her reduction surgery ‘without the BMI restriction’, though they have advised her to ‘bring my weight down as much as possible’.
If she can get surgery she says ‘it would mean the absolute world to me’ and be ‘all my Christmases in one day’, and is planning a party if she can get the procedure done.
“It would be a complete life changer – I’d be able to play with my kids at the park and pick up my daughter,” Melissa said.