Surgery and recovery

Let’s review.

The evening of May 4 I had my usual stylist cut my hair extremely short so I wouldn’t have hair to worry about for a few weeks. I feel quite ugly/scary and thus no photos.

Odd to think about now, but the morning of surgery all I can remember is how hard it seemed to go about my day without food or coffee or even water, waiting for my 2 pm surgery. No fear, just crabby/hungry and wanting to get the show on the road.

“Out” the minute I got into the OR. Came to in recovery and immediately eager to hear what had been done to me. Not until I reached my hospital room for the night did I learn how big and deep the tumor had been (the piece removed roughly the size of a boiled egg cut the long way, the center of which was deep into the pectoral muscle) and that the plastic surgeon had been able to stretch enough skin into place to close the hole without going too far away from the site. There had been two trips to the lab while I was on the table to make sure margins were clear of cancer cells – and two days later it was absolutely confirmed that all cancer cells in the area of the tumor had been successfully scooped out.

Good night in the hospital with morphine and then hydrocodone and early discharge on Friday. The ride to my sister’s condo where I would convalesce seemed incredibly bumpy though I was wearing a very tight stretchy bandage around my entire torso (around the back) to hold things in place.

Stayed high on pain pills through Sunday. Super attitude. My usual personality. Ate well and didn’t look at my wounds. Felt pain, but good drugs make you not care about the pain.

On Monday I went off the pain meds cold turkey and became creepy- crawly weak, sick and nauseated with hypersensitivity to anything touching my skin (including air) and any smells. Elaine drove me to the plastic surgeon’s that morning where I caught my first glimpse of damages and where it was decided I should keep my drain tube in for several more days as it was still collecting significant fluid. They replaced my tight torso bandages with a close-in-front sport bra, very tight.

Spent Monday feeling sick and very, very depressed and anxious.

Tuesday was much better. My brother came to visit and the three of us siblings told stories from childhood and laughed the morning away.

Greg picked me up for re-entry into normal life at our house yesterday afternoon around 4 pm. Elaine and I both cried as we closed our chapter of being together at the condo, so unsure of what the future would hold for each of us. (She is having rotator cuff surgery as soon as she can, back in Texas.) And would it surprise anyone that before I’d even gotten settled in back at home, Greg was called out for an emergency at a mill? This did not go over very big with me, but I’ll spare you the details.

As I tried to relax in my coziest recliner, I decided I was growing tired of having tight fabric wound around my torso the past five days. I unhooked the sport bra to calmly survey what lay beneath – and to my creepy-crawly horror realized for the first time that the tightness I’d been attributing to the chest bandage and later the sports bra was not, after all, the bandage or the bra. It was my skin, being pulled from either side to meet over my left chest wall and close the wound. Yikes! I do hope that sensation isn’t permanent. I had a vision of being on the surgery table…wondered what kind of gripping tools must have been used to effectively pull that much skin to make a tidy seam.

And so it goes.