As my surgery date approached, I tried to continue life as "normal-for-us" as possible for everyone. I drove kids to/from school and activities, I cooked, and I cleaned. As I went about my daily tasks, I thought through what might need to be modified in the days/weeks after surgery. I was weirdly obsessed with making sure the strings on the bare lightbulb fixtures in the basement were long enough so I wouldn't have to lift my arms to reach them.
The week of surgery, I had a pre-op with my surgeon on Monday followed by bloodwork. No big deal. The day before surgery, Wednesday, I had a pre-op with my plastic surgeon. No big deal, I thought. But that plastic surgeon kept on surprising me with how important of a role he actually played in this whole drama. I had my husband snap a picture of me before the plastic surgeon came in - I had remembered to set up everything, but this was the end of the line for the boobs I had had my whole life. I had forgotten to remember them. The surgeon came in and drew all over me - marking my entire chest up from armpit to armpit, lines going every which direction. He gave me the marker and told me to redraw any lines that faded between then and surgery the next morning.
I went home and tried to get some sleep, which was just not possible.
The morning of surgery, Thursday, January 30, 2020, I woke up early, my mom and dad arrived early to stay with the kids and get them off to school; they would later meet my husband at the hospital to sit with him in the waiting room. My husband and I left and headed up to the hospital around the corner from our house. We checked in, they took me back and started prepping me for surgery.
I had to take a pregnancy test (LOL! Not a chance I was pregnant), strip down, and get my IV started. The anesthesiologist visited and went over the plan, surgeon visited and went over the plan, the plastic surgeon did not visit before surgery. I had to have a procedure done before being taken back wherein they inject dye into each of my breasts and I needed to massage both well afterwards. This was to track which of the lymph nodes each of breasts drained to so they could take the first few from each side along with the breast tissue to biopsy them for cancer cells. This is pretty standard and created a moment of levity in the room beforehand as my husband offered to help me with the massage. Always a helper!
Next thing I knew, I was off to surgery. The nurses commented that I was so calm. In their experience, women were hysterically crying and terrified when they were going for mastectomies. I felt emotional; it was scary, no doubt, but this was what would get the cancer out of my body - so LET'S GO!
When I awoke in the recovery room, my husband was with me. I asked him if I was ugly now and he assured me that I wasn't. I had no pain at all and surprisingly little nausea. I drifted in and out of consciousness the rest of the day. I remember hearing people in my room visiting: my mom, my dad, my brother (in his Police uniform), my husband. When I woke up the next morning, my surgeon came in and refilled my pain pump with numbing medicine so I would remain pain-free for days! He was so kind, he even found my cell phone and brought it over to me. When he left, I took a few selfies. Too embarrassing! I went home later that day and was there when my kids all got home from school/activities. I was so happy to see my kiddos. I had missed them so much and I wanted so badly to hug them as tight as I could.
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| Hospital Selfie |
About a week later, Dr. R called me with the surgical biopsy results. The tumor in my left breast was much larger than expected: 7.5cm x 3cm. There was no cancer found in my right breast - PRAISE GOD! There was no cancer found in the lymph nodes on my right side, but there was cancer found in 4 of the 5 lymph nodes removed on my left side. This would change my treatment plan drastically. I would now require chemotherapy instead of just radiation. She already had set up an appointment for me with an oncologist.
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| My reasons to fight! |
I now went weekly to the plastic surgeon to have my chest expanders expanded. Expanders had been placed under the skin of my chest to create new breast mounds. I did not have skin-sparing mastectomies, so each week the plastic surgeon would inject saline into the "implants" in my chest. The first couple of times I went, I was terrified - the needle was HUGE - so I took some powerful pain meds the plastic surgeon had given me. My mom would just laugh at how silly it made me. I didn't have any pain though!
Two weeks after surgery, I met with my medical oncologist. He is the sweetest man. Gentle, patient, kind, reassuring, smart - all the things you would want in a doctor tasked with delivering such difficult news to patients. He wanted to come up with a treatment plan, and said I'd need to do a few tests to verify that the cancer had not spread beyond the lymph nodes and that it was truly a Stage 3 cancer and not a Stage 4. Stage 4 treatment is very different from Stage 3 treatment. And it carries a very different prognosis.
Cue the tears.
