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.