Post-surgery update

                Just a quick note to let you all know the surgery went very well, indeed.

                “Now, that’s a happy nipple!” said the nurse who re-did my dressings today.

                Really, it was much, much easier than I had expected. The surgery itself was over before I was aware it had started. Yay for general anesthesia! I only took the painkiller, oxycodone, for a few hours, as it made me dizzy and nauseous. I took one pill for the nausea, and I went to bed. I woke up yesterday very dizzy, and bright red. Somewhere in that IV they had stuck some steroids to help fight nausea, so I looked pretty red there for a few hours. I used to look like that a lot during chemo. By noon, it had all worn off, and I was fine, and that was it.

                The surgery was Tuesday. This is Thursday, and the pain level is nearly zero. There is a little irritation where some of the bandages are. That’s pretty much it. I get stitches out and so forth on Monday.

                My plastic surgeon explained to me that there was one sort of decision that had to be made about where the nipple went, in the end. There are two ways of locating the best place for a nipple:  1) centering it in the ideal place on the breast, so that one breast looks great, or; 2) centering it in the ideal place relative to the other breast, so they are level and such.  Now, these two spots are not necessarily the same, because people are asymmetrical and especially so, when you have been new-and-improved, as I was. So in the end, she split the difference and fudged it. I am sure it will be fine when it all gets unwrapped. This did all involve some measuring tape and a Sharpie pen and some fifth-grade geometry skills.

                The last step will be getting this Frankenboob tattooed so it is the same color as the other one. Can’t do that for a couple months, until the nipple settles down a little. The plastic surgery nurse said the tattooing really distracts visually from any scarring and really fools the eye. She said when this is all done, if I should get naked, say, in a gym changing room, and someone sees that breast, they might not notice anything is wrong.

                I should have told her, but I didn’t, that my own personal goal is that, in the end, if I choose to go to Jerry Johnson Hot Springs next time I head out west, and if I choose to get naked with the other folks soaking there, nobody will run away screaming, or at least, if they do, it won’t be because of the Frankenboob. We'll see how that turns out.

What I've been doing the last few weeks...

                Well, it has been a while since I checked in with you all. A lot of stuff has been going on, so it’s time to catch you up. Basically, my mom, Ruth, got sick in December. It seemed to everyone, for a few weeks, that she was going to get better, but a few days after Christmas it became apparent that she wasn’t. She died on New Year’s Day, in Missoula, with her children and friends all around.

As it happened, while we had all thought she just had a really bad case of shingles, it turned out that the pain from the shingles was masking pain from something more serious. She had blood clots in major arteries in her intestines, probably as a result of a cancer metastasized from somewhere else in her body. This caused her to die of a massive, overwhelming infection. We will never know where the original cancer was. She went from diagnosis to hospice within a few hours.

                So I haven’t been writing much of anything about my own cancer. The only thing I’ve felt like writing about is my mom, and I am not even ready to write anything useful about her yet. She was wonderful. I had thought I was prepared for the possibility of losing her. After all, she was 88 years old, and I’m a grownup, and I’ve lost people before. Well, I was wrong. Preparing yourself for losing a great mom isn’t something you can do; you just experience it when it happens. It is like riding a tsunami. Waves of sadness keep washing over me. It wasn’t something you could prepare for.

                I will say, I am blessed with the best friends a person could have. At each point in the last month when I thought I could go no further or my head was just going to explode, one of my friends would miraculously show up. My brother was on the same flight from Seattle to Missoula as I was.  My high school sweetheart, who I had been trying to locate for months, appeared when my mom had been asking about him. My dear friends, Dave and Natalee, were passing through Missoula on their way from Helena, Montana, to their home in Seattle, on the very day my mom died. My college roommate, Anne, saw on Facebook what had happened, and she drove ten hours from Seattle to be with me. My old friend, Steve, took me for walks when I needed to get out of that hospital room, and he made sure I ate food from time to time. He and Anne sat up with me until 4a.m. the night of the funeral, drinking Scotch and playing Ban anagrams.

                I have been back in Maryland for two weeks now. Life plugs on. My own stupid cancer gave me another scare last week, when I found a suspicious lump in my “bad” right breast. That surely got my attention. But the doctor says it is nothing to worry about, just something interesting that happened. Basically, the implant in there has flipped over, like a breech baby. Now back of the implant has a little round lump, where they sealed it after they filled it with silicone. But now it’s back-to-front, and the lump is on the front, where I managed to find it. Who knew that could happen? The doctor said turning it back around would be, basically, way unpleasant, and I should just learn to live with my little idiosyncrasy. I’m fine with that.

                I’ve had it with “way unpleasant.” As it happens, I am going in for my next round of plastic surgery tomorrow morning. I have already in hand some serious nasty controlled-substance pain pills. This is the surgery where I get to have a skin graft. They peel off a piece of me from my left side and graft it onto my right, to make me a nipple to replace the one that I lost in the mastectomy. When I met with my plastic surgeon, Dr. Kathy Huang, on Thursday, she once again asked me if I wanted to be awake for this procedure. And I laughed at her again. What part of “Hell, no!” had been unclear? I told her, again, not only do I want to be as asleep as I can be, but I would prefer to be asleep somewhere on the planet Mars.

                But she and I always have the most surreal conversations. Most of them would be pretty funny if you were a fly on the wall, listening. For example, tomorrow, my surgery is at 7:30a.m., but she was explaining why I have to actually be there by 6a.m., without benefit of coffee.

                “We have to decide where we are going to put your nipple,” she says.

                I am thinking, it would not take me 90 minutes to answer that question. I already have a pretty good idea where I would put it. But maybe I’m being too much of a traditionalist.  I will consider my other options. I hadn’t realized there were other options. I would have stuck it right about here. Measure twice, and cut once, I would say. This is more math than art, right? But possibly I am wrong. Maybe there is more to this than I thought, and this is going to involve a compass and a plumb line and a big black Sharpie pen and be way unpleasant.  And all without coffee.

                My doctor also gave me a two-page, typed list, with three columns of small print, of the many drugs I must not use as my surgery approaches. Fortunately, Scotch is not on that list. I can’t drink anything, including water, after midnight tonight. But that means I still have a good hour left…