It has
been a while since I checked in with you, but that is because not much was
happening on the cancer front. I can now report that I got my tattoo yesterday!
This was supposed to have happened some weeks ago, but it got postponed due to
scheduling problems with my tattoo artist, Tina, and then I was in Montana for
a while.
To
recap, my doctors have made me a new breast pretty much out of whole cloth.
Since they took out the whole original one, they had to start from scratch.
They stretched my own skin big enough to make one with the aid of a thing
called a “tissue expander,” which they gradually pumped full of water and which
set off the metal detector every single time I got on an airplane last
year. Then they took that thing out and
replaced it with a garden-variety implant. Next, they did a skin graft and made
me an origami nipple out of my own flesh and appliquéd it on there. Yesterday,
it was time to color the little brown circle, or areola, on there. That’s where
Tina came in.
Tina
owns the Tantric Tattoo and Boutique in Sandy Spring. But she also works with
the Plastic Surgery Institute of Washington and my own surgeon, Dr. Kathy
Huang, to reconstruct breasts for women like me. I asked her yesterday, while she
was mixing her ink, how many of these she had done, and she said, “Thousands.”
Tattooing
one of these takes about an hour. Tina does the tattooing in the plastic
surgeon’s office in North Bethesda.
Now, back
when I had discussed this tattoo procedure with Dr. Huang, I asked if there
would be Novocain or something. She said since they had disconnected all the
nerves when they did the mastectomy, I would not feel a thing. I told her I was
pretty sure I was getting feeling back in that breast, and I told her there had
better be Novocain or something, or I would arrange my own pain relief and that
might get ugly. I have too many memories of doctors and technicians sticking
needles into my breast the last two years, which hurts like hell, to sit there
quietly while someone sticks a needle in my breast, over and over, for an hour,
without medication.
Dr.
Huang and the nurse laughed and someone said I should get a margarita before I
came in and everything would be fine. But then my appointment got moved to 10am
and a margarita appeared unlikely. The Montana solution to this dilemma: a hip flask full of huckleberry vodka, just
in case.
Well,
don’t the Boy Scouts teach us it’s always good to be prepared? There was no Novocain
or anything like it. So I went to the ladies’ room and tossed one back. As it
turned out, that was a smart move, because getting a tattoo on your nipple
hurts. A lot. When Tina began to “break up the skin,” as she put it, poking it
with lots of holes so that the numbing spray she used would sink into the under
layer of skin, I about jumped out of the chair. She was about half done when I
called a time-out. This hurts, I said. It really hurts. What’s the deal with
that?
She
said this was actually good news. It was unusual for this procedure to be
painful, but what it meant was that my nerves are regenerating, and faster and
better than expected. This bode well for me regaining some sensation in that
breast, and what’s not to like about that? Meanwhile, Tina went and got some numbing
cream that made it slightly less painful, and she was able to finish the job. I
was pretty much cranky for the rest of the day. I laid off the vodka and
switched to Advil, but it was sore.
The good
news: it really looks good, and that’s now, when the color is a little raw and
overdone, and I still have that malformed nipple on there. When the color
settles down a little and we fix that oversized nipple, it is going to be
awesome. Much of the surgical scar is no longer visible, and the robo-boob now
looks a lot like the other one. This is amazing to me. If I drink enough vodka
one day, I might post before-and-after pictures, because the difference is
astounding, but I hope that day never comes!
That’s
all until next time, when I will report on the Washington, DC, Race for the
Cure! I bought an awesome pink cowboy hat in Montana for the occasion, but
already the pink is literally chipping off in chunks. A fitting metaphor for
the pinkwashing of America? Check out this article in the New York Times
Magazine if you want to think long and hard about Komen, the way pink money
is spent, and everything:
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