Oh, it’s been a busy, cray, cray time in and out of the Birdhouse with my happenings. I know I haven’t posted for more than a month, and I beg your pardon for the delay. I’ve given short updates on Facebook, my preferred social media drug, so there will be a little repetition here.

As last said, I had a bilateral (double) mastectomy on Sept. 21. What I didn’t really explain is the chaos surrounding that event, before and after. Once the pathology report (Path-Port) came back from my second lumpectomy showing that this damn cancer was deeper than any of us thought, we volleyed the options back and forth with my doctors and decided to turn first to aggressive chemo, much upped in type and time than we had originally planned.

(WARNING: Graphic medical info to follow…)

I was shopping online for knitted caps and turbans when I got the call on the morning of Sept. 16 that my surgeon was VERY concerned about the site of the second lumpectomy. See, it wasn’t healing. She had not inserted a drain into this one, for which I was initially very grateful. But my Poor Boob would not stop building up fluid. With the absence of a drain to suck out and receive the fluids, I ended up in my surgeon’s office several times so she could drain me there. With a huge honking needle. In my Poor Boob. Which was numb, but still…. (Are you gritting your teeth yet, because I am!)

The lack of healing was probably a factor of the cancer itself impeding the healing, we were told. If we continued to wait for Poor Boob to heal to start chemo, we could be waiting for weeks, and that would not be good. At. All. So I got scheduled for the mastectomy the next week. We were floored. Again.

I can’t tell you how hard it is to gently and firmly turn your emotions and prayers to one frightening treatment direction only to have to switch direction for urgent reasons. As a patient, I want to be calm and confident. I want my stress levels to be as low as possible, because this kind of stress is so damaging for the body. But sudden changes create fear and worry, and more so for my husband and kid. Poor Samantha has been reeling throughout this whole experience with the many changes in my status and diagnosis. Stephen has been more stalwart, but I can see the ravages of stress about him as well.

So surgery involved three surgeons: Dr. B would perform the mastectomy, Dr. TB would insert the Port-A-Cath for my future chemo, and Dr. H would do the initial reconstruction work. I was out for eight hours, in the hospital for two days and nights and went home with a couple of drains, this time on both sides. I tolerated everything well and the pain was manageable, I thought.

We were told several interesting things right after the surgery. For those who never met me in real life, I was fairly well-endowed. At a 34DDD bust, there was a lot of flesh to deal with, and this is one of the main reasons why it was so hard to determine the extent of my cancer.  With my dense breast tissue, all of the many types of scans I had could never ascertain exactly how much cancer was happening on my right side. And that’s why I decided to give up my left boob as well. The dense tissue issue is the same for both breasts and forever more, I would never trust a scan on that left breast. A smaller reason was that there was no way I would have reconstructed my right side to a 34DDD again, so a reduction would have been needed anyway. These are the things that we had to consider as we faced this surgery. What I didn’t have time to decide, though, (and this becomes important later) was what KIND of reconstruction I would have down the road, after chemo.

In a nutshell there are three main types: saline implants, silicon implants, and tissue reconstruction that involves using my fat (from my tummy) to build a “breast.” There are several versions of this, but it’s most commonly called the “flap.” When done successfully, it ensures that you have no foreign materials in your body, and is more natural, but what I would need to do would involve several surgeries, one of which would be major and leave me in the ICU for five nights. So this was a big commitment in contrast to the implants, which is usually a one or two surgery deal.

Because I was still researching, Dr. B implanted expanders into my chest, behind my pectoral muscles, which would help gradually stretch the skin over time to later accommodate implants, if I went in that direction. If I went for the flap, well it wasn’t going to hurt having them. They would just come out when the time was right.

We were told after the surgery that after years of hauling around 34DDDs–which weighed about 8 pounds together, ahem–that my pectoral muscles were deliciously well-developed and that should help hold the expanders in place. We were also reassured that having the double mastectomy was a good idea. When the path-port from this surgery came back, it was all good news: NO AFFECTED LYMPH NODES, CLEAR MARGINS ON THE RIGHT SIDE FINALLY AND NO CANCER AT ALL IN THE LEFT BOOB! Now all I needed to do was heal so I could start chemo, about a 4-week process.

TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW BECAUSE THIS IS JUST TOO DARN LONG TO POST ALL AT ONCE.