Surgery Time!

My mastectomy was scheduled for Thursday March 7th.  My husband and I left the house at 5:30am that morning because we were due to check in at 6am with a surgery time of 7:15am.  No eating or drinking after midnight.  No eating was easy but when you drink as much water as I do, simply being awake without a glass of water is torture.  By the time we got to the hospital I swear I was dying of dehydration... my tongue kept getting stuck to the roof of my mouth.  And I thought this was really annoying.... Ha! Annoying hadn't even started yet!

Getting Ready...

I checked in and was given the obligatory hospital robe and surgical socks to put on. Then I had to wait there until the surgeons showed up.  My husband, Dad, and Dad's girlfriend (my entertainment entourage) were there with me.  For 30 days prior to surgery I could not have any aspirin or any other type of medication that would result in thinning of the blood so I was very surprised and skeptical when they told me I needed to take an aspirin. Then I was mortified because of course I couldn't eat or drink anything so they had to administer the aspirin another way.... I thought once I had passed my infant months I would be done with people shoving things up my butt... I guess I was wrong. At this point I forgot about my annoying dry mouth.

Before surgery I had 2 nagging worries.  First of all, we had a great dinner the night before at the Olive Garden and I was unable to go to the bathroom that morning.  I was preoccupied with the thought that I was going to poop myself on the operating table.  This was always my biggest fear when I birthed my kids too. I guess everyone has that one weird thing that they obsess about.  My second fear was that I was going through all this and was going to end up with little boobs. 

I was there first for a mastectomy where Dr. Lindfield would remove all my breast tissue on both sides. Then she would run a series of complete pathology tests on the 3 tumors that were found to be cancerous and the 4th tumor which the MRI found but I opted not to have biopsied.  Secondly, Dr Lindfield was going to do a Sentinel Node Biopsy on the lymph nodes closest to my boobs on both sides. The purpose of this was to determine if the cancer had spread from the primary tumors to my lymphatic system. Once cancer spreads to the lympathic system it is much more likely to metastasize (or grow elsewhere in the body).  That would be bad.  As it was explained to me, Dr Lindfield was going to surgically remove the sentinel lymph node (the one closest to the tumors) and check it under a specific light that will make the injection I got yesterday glow. If she sees cancer, she will take the next lymph node and examine it again. This continues until she finds lymph nodes with no cancer. 

The third part of this surgery was reconstruction. Dr Burke would cut a triangle of skin, fat, and blood vessels from my tummy, cut it in 2, and then use that tissue to make me 2 new boobs.  This part was going to take awhile.  Apparently you can't just take skin and tissue from one part of the body, place it somewhere else, and then expect it to grow. Dr Burke needs to take the tissue with the main blood supply and reconnect it to a main artery and vein in my chest so that blood and oxygen could be delivered to the transplanted skin and fat. This portion of the surgery would need to be done under a microscope. Because of this part of the surgery, my family was told to expect me to be in surgery for 8-9 hours.  This was the part I was scared of. I am a bigger girl. I have not seen Dr Burke since my 2nd consult at the end of January. I never told him what I wanted. Since Dr Lindfield operates first and then Dr Burke, the nurses told me I probably wouldn't see him before I went under anesthesia. This made me nervous. So I did what any logical business person would do.... I wrote him a note on a post-it and left it taped to my tummy.  The note read:

Dr Burke - Please remember your inner "boob man" when doing my reconstruction. I left you plenty of "raw materials" and I trust you know that I don't need any of it. Take it all to assure I am properly proportioned up top. Good luck!"

 

 In addition to leaving a lovely note for Dr Burke, I was sporting event-specific paraphernalia. To cover the fact that I wasn't wearing any makeup, I wore my boob glasses given to me by my friends from the MMA Class of 1993 at my Bye Bye Boobie party. All the nurses in pre-op thought it was just great and humor makes the waiting before surgery so much more manageable. 

At about 8:00 am I saw Dr Lindfield in her scrubs with her cap on. She came over to make sure I was ready and that I have received my dose of aspirin (I swear she did that just to torture me).  When I assured her that I did, they came and attached an IV in my left arm connected to saline. Then they brought a large tank of gas and laid it next to me on the bed.  I said goodbye to my family and then they wheeled my bed through the scary halls of ECMC. I remember getting into the operating room and seeing that they had a large 42in LCD TV on the wall and were playing the morning show on the radio.  As they were moving me from my bed to a hard, cold table, I asked if the TV was there so we could watch the Walking Dead.  The nurse put a mask over my face and replied "not you, my dear"... I said "aw maaaaaa.......".

Waking Up...

As it turned out, I was not an open and shut case. My 8-9 hour surgery turned into a 13 hour surgery. I may be a big girl, but I have little itty bitty veins. Dr Burke had a really hard time reconnecting my blood supply in my chest.  When I woke up, it was 9:00 at night and they had given me 7 liters of fluid.  My husband said I was so swollen that my eyes were slits. Unfortunately I have no fun pictures of that. Even I would have liked to see that!



Grandma beating my foot with a water bottle

When I got out of surgery, I had 2 new boobs (Frankenboobs as I called them), 2 surgical slits under my armpits (Where the lymph nodes came out of), 4 drains in my chest (along with 4 holes for the drains to go into), one slit from one hip bone to the other where Dr Burke took my tummy away, and 2 drains in my abdomen above my pubic bone.  And with all this, I was in pain but not at any of these surgical sites. My feet hurt.  I have been suffering from heel spurs (Plantar fasciitis) for almost a year now. The pain had all but gone away though when I lost weight from my new clean eating diet that Grandma put me on.  Before the weight loss, I had the pain in check because I would go to a chiropractor and he would use a mini jack hammer on the plantar fascia tendon which would kill, but then feel better.  When I got out of surgery, my left foot was pounding. I have no idea why. It brought tears to my eyes.  I could feel my heart beat in my heel.  I was screaming for my family to get Dr Jafari (my chiropractor) to come with his jack hammer and kill the pain in my heel. Obviously Dr Jafari was not coming so my Grandmother defaulted to the next best thing... a water bottle.  She beat the hell out of my heel just like Dr Jafari would have with a full water bottle.  No matter how hard she hit, it wasn't helping, I kept telling her to hit it harder.  We got pictures of that because that was just weird.  My entire 7 day stay at the hospital, my heels gave me trouble. I guess it is for the best so I didn't focus on the fact that my torso looked like I had been autopsied.