We are gearing up for my big surgery the day after tomorrow, trying to get all our kids’ schedules aligned and all our ducks in a row. We owe a lot of thanks to friends who are running here and there to pick up and feed and entertain and comfort our kids this week! Thanks, guys!
In the end, I decided to not have surgery on the second breast. The odds are pretty good it will never develop cancer, and I just don’t feel like any unnecessary medical procedures right now.
This attitude on my part made for an interesting exchange with my plastic surgeon, when we first met.
“What is your current bra size?” she asked.
I told her.
“What bra size would you like it to be?” she asked.
I just sat there and looked stupid for a minute. This was not a question I had ever asked myself. I had never wished my breasts were smaller, or bigger, or more even. I had become aware, at some point when I was breastfeeding children, that my breasts were not perfectly even. Well, that is why God made bra straps adjustable, I thought. Really, until my breasts tried to murder me, I was quite happy with them the way they were.
Silly me! When you really measure them and photograph them and take a plumb line to them and think about them like a plastic surgeon does, there’s a lot of aesthetic problems there we could fix. They aren’t even. And they’re too big, apparently, or too “generous,” as one of the doctors put it, trying to be nice. And they’re getting sort of saggy, compared to what they could be.
Because, it turns out, my boobs and I have Options. We could do an old-fashioned implant. Or we could take one of my back muscles and fashion a new boob out of it. Or they could use of my abs. Or part of my middle-aged gut, and give me a tummy tuck at the same time. And then, I could have surgery on the other boob, to make it smaller and perkier and match the other one more perfectly. And when they tattoo the colored parts on there (which they do) I could get a sexy little butterfly or something on there as well. The girls could be better than they were before…better…stronger…faster.
But I’m just no fun. Unless it is going to give me a real chance at living longer, I am not interested in a boob job right now. Which is just as well, it turns out, since none of those more-complicated plastic surgeries could be done until some months after radiation is finished, anyway. And I don’t even start radiation until some time in September. So I have time to think it over. Meanwhile, all they can really do is basic reconstruction, where they implant a sort of inner-tube in there, which they gradually fill, over the course of a few weeks, with saline to make room for whatever we implant in there later. That won’t be for maybe nine months or a year.
For now, the rest of this cancer management seems to be going well. It is so good to not be on chemo anymore! I still feel a little better every day, and I finished chemotherapy a month ago. I have pretty much got all the feeling back in my fingertips. My fingernails never fell off. Most of them did get nasty brown spots that looked like nicotine stains, but even those are fading now. I did have one big toenail that I kept on with Band-Aids for some time, but it is also doing better. I have some nasty scars on my arm, from a PIC line and another Taxotere burn, but they are beginning to fade some. I am still bald and my eyes are still tearing all the time, but those problems should start coming right soon.
I did have a scare about a week and a half ago, when the person at Sibley who was giving me my pre-op physical found what she described as a “growth” in my right eye. I hadn’t known it was there, inside my lower eyelid, but darned if she wasn’t right. A really ugly-looking thing, too, and she said I should have my doctor look at it since we don’t want to mess with our vision, do we?
I certainly don’t. I am a painter, among other things, and messing with our vision would certainly play hob with that, or with driving kids around town. But even worse, when you say “a growth” to a person with breast cancer, that person immediately jumps to the conclusion that there’s been a metastasis and she now has breast cancer in her eye, and is going to die.
Fortunately, after I left there and panicked for about a half an hour, I called my oncologist. One of his wonder nurses called me back almost immediately, and explained to me that persons like myself who go utterly bald after chemotherapy—and that includes losing your eyelashes—well, you get all sorts of cysts and things in your eyes because your eyelashes aren’t there to keep junk out. Who knew eyelashes are so functional? I didn’t.
But happily, today I finally got in to see my eye doctor and he confirmed that this little lump in my eye is annoying but totally harmless. Yay!
On a more serious note, perhaps our largest problem of late has been our youngest child’s reaction to all this. Matthew, who is 8 years old, is an anxious kid anyway. But my illness really threw him for a loop, and he started both acting out aggressively and also having anxiety attacks. We are now seeing a very good therapist in D.C., and we think this is helping him. It’s a schlepp to get down there, but Matthew likes him, which is great. Thanks for everyone’s prayers and good thoughts in this area!
No comments:
Post a Comment