Post Surgery Report

I'm finally getting around to a post.  Surgery was Monday, June 1st.

I was so scared to go in, but everything went well. One big fear was the anesthesia. And when I ended up with a young anesthesiology fellow, I was nervous. The supervising doctor would be switching off with her because it was such a long surgery. And I was just that, a long surgery. I was expecting 8-10 hours and was worried about that. But it ended up being 12 hours!

I went to the IMU (a step down from the ICU) from surgery and was there for 4 days. It was a rough recovery. It's hard when you've got abdominal and chest recovery at the same time because you can't compensate for one by using the other. I had to rely on my legs and it was hard. I won't go into the detail of my surgery but you can look it up if you feel the need. I chose to do a double mastectomy with immediate DIEP reconstruction (that's the part I'll leave up to you to look up). 

When I received my pathology report, it was great news! It looks like chemo was very effective. There were a few, random cancer cells still present, but a lot of tissue showing "chemo effect". That basically means the masses where cancer was present were destroyed! They removed 16 lymph nodes and 6 of them showed chemo effect. They still remove everything because of the few cells left. We don't need them replicating!! 

Because the surgery was so long, blood clots were a worry. I had to take lovenox shots every day for 4 weeks. Not fun. Luckily I have a couple of nice friends that were willing to come over and stick me every morning. I was too scared to do it myself.

Again, it was a rough recovery. But I had a lot of help and I'm VERY thankful for it. It's been very hard for me to be so useless to my kids. I want to be able to take them to the park or the carnival or for ice cream or a walk. I couldn't do any of that for several weeks. It's a little sad for me to send them with others.

But I'm feeling pretty normal now. My energy is coming back and I'm doing well. I have limited range of motion in my left arm and I'll have to do exercise therapy and work on that. It's because of the lymph node removal. 

Anyway, I'm so happy to have that behind me!!