I
wanted to update you on my main reconstruction surgery, which happened almost
two weeks ago now. Time flies when you
are taking drugs! Seriously, though, I stopped taking the drugs pretty
fast. The pain just wasn’t that bad, and
the drugs made me think I had scorpions in my hair. I am now back to the
occasional Advil and a glass of wine, and am scorpion-free. It’s sore, but
nothing I can’t handle. Getting my last wisdom tooth out was a whole lot worse.
I was worried about getting some sort of terrible post-op infection or
something, which one of my friends did following her reconstruction, but
everything went fine. Thank you all for
your prayers!
The day
I was diagnosed with cancer back in March 2011, or maybe the day after, a
friend of mine who did this whole miserable trip a couple years ahead of me
told me they can work miracles with the plastic surgery, nowadays. Of all the things I could be worrying about,
she said, I shouldn’t worry about my physical appearance at the end of the day,
because they could fix it. In fact, she
told me, if we weren’t at a P.T.A. meeting at that moment, which we were, she
would whip them out and show me just how happy the girls could be in the
end! I replied that was not necessary, I
could take her word for it, but I was very, very encouraged to hear it. In later months, I hung onto her words and
would tell myself, things might look pretty atrocious right now, but we are
going to fix them.
Well,
fix them we did. Or, at least we are
well on our way. I had outpatient
surgery on Sept. 19. The surgery took
about three hours. On the right side, where I had the mastectomy, they replaced
the temporary “tissue expander” with a regular old implant. The other side, they just reduced and hoisted
everything up to the same level as the other one.
I am
amazed at how much better things look and feel already. The tissue expander
felt pretty much like a cannon ball in there, or maybe a duckpin bowling
ball. The new implant feels like you
would want a breast to feel. Yay! The
metal parts are gone, so I can now have my regular M.R.I. to make sure nothing
wacky is growing in there. And my boob will no longer set off the T.S.A. metal
detectors when I get on an airplane, which will be nice to never have to
explain to a T.S.A. man again.
I am
awestruck by the artistry of my surgeon, Dr. Kathy Huang. She had to visualize where the one side would
end up after one kind of procedure, and then imagine where the other side ought
to end up, following a completely different procedure, and then execute. And she did!
The symmetry she achieved is more than I had hoped for. Oh, it all still looks pretty terrible,
because of bruising and swelling and stitches and such. So don’t worry about me posting any
embarrassing inappropriate photos here anytime soon. But I can see where it is
all headed, and it is headed toward a good place.
Recently,
a photographer called David Jay has promoted something called The SCAR
Project. He makes beautiful portraits of
young women with breast cancer, scars and all.
The portraits are very powerful and many are very beautiful. But I was
struck, reading the online comments people have left on some of them, by how
much some people were put off by the scars.
Some of the saddest comments came from women, and there was one that
horrified me, from a woman who said she would rather die of breast cancer than
have her body scarred like that. It broke my heart that she thought those were
her only two options. They are not. I want people to know that.
Anybody
that is reading this who is facing breast cancer themselves, or in their
family, know this: you can ask your
plastic surgeon to see some of his or her before-and-after pictures. They should have a portfolio of them to show
you. Or, in a few months, I will have some of my own that I would be willing to
share if it would help. Yes, you can
look decent again.
Now, I
have two more “procedures” to go. In a
few months, they install a nipple on there.
How this works, I do not know, but it sounds like it involves human
embroidery, or a combination of embroidery and
origami? They have promised to
knock me out again so I don’t have to watch whatever they do.
A few
months later still, the other procedure involves a tattoo artist. It might also
involve a bunch of wine, on my part, or maybe worse. My brother tells me that
traditionally, you get drunk and then
decide to get a tattoo, not the other way around. But I do not personally want to be mentally
present while they stick needles in me, repeatedly, in my nipple, for God’s
sake. As it happens, when you have a mastectomy, there comes a point on the
morning of the surgery when they have to inject you with radioactive isotopes
so they can find all your lymph nodes. Unfortunately, they have to do this
several times, right in your nipple, with absolutely no pain medication because
that interferes with the way things flow. They don’t tell you about this in
advance, because it hurts like hell and they know it, and they can’t do
anything about that. Those were probably the most painful physical moments of
this whole stupid process, for me, so far.
So, when I get tattooed, I plan to be comfortably numb, one way or
another. Negotiations continue on this point.
I do get
to start doing limited, non-bouncy forms of exercise today. Yay!
It will be another couple of weeks before I can do weights or run. But we’re getting there!
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