My Lemons: Surgery #1

Coming back here I have one blog post in “drafts” titled:

My Lemons: Double Mas

That’s it. I didn’t even finish the title. Or I didn’t know how to spell mastectomy? Either way, clearly I didn’t really want to talk about it.

My first surgery was a double mastectomy June 2021. It took place about two weeks after my last chemo session. I remember feeling like…

“I just ran a marathon and now you want me to climb a mountain? Are you F*ucking kidding me?”

I was tired of being tired, but I knew I had one more obstacle to crush. Even reading my post “Pre Surgery” I can tell I am trying to put on a brave face. Honestly, I was scared shitless. I had never had surgery before or really any major medical treatment. Childbirth was probably the closes thing and most time I spent in a hospital.

Surgery Day

Adam and I had to be at the hospital at 5am I think. They give you a number and you just wait with everyone else for your number to get called. It was bizarre. Once my number was called I checked in and headed up to the day surgery floor alone. They give you scrubs to change into in a curtained space and wait.

I kept myself entertained by just watching the unit wake up. Employees and patients filtering in. Listening in on the people next to me. Anything to keep my mind off what I was about to do.

Finally, my turn came and along with a handful of other patients, we walked through the hospital to another waiting room. A flurry of surgeons and anesthesiologists came in to chat with their patients. I had a wonderful team. My surgeons are total rock stars and just seeing familiar faces made me feel 100x better. Because I was doing the mastectomy and reconstruction at the same time I have two surgeons, one for each.

If you’ve never had surgery, the room feels like a spaceship. They don’t mess around in there. As soon as I was in, I was down on the table and getting hooked up to all the things. Then came the gas mask. My ears started to ring, I heard the heart rate monitor going up, and the last thing I remember thinking about was Adam and the girls.

The surgeons removed all my breast tissue (an nipples) and put in an expander under my pec muscle to start creating room for an implant. Then they stitched me up. I was a candidate for a double mastectomy because of my BRCA-1 diagnosis. I only had cancerous tumors in one breast but my chances of it coming back are much higher so they took them both.

Post Double Mastectomy and Reconstruction Recovery

I’ll spare you the details of coming out of surgery and that first 24 hours. Let’s be real, I was on a lot of drugs so there aren’t a lot of details. Again it was just a bizarre experience (if you find yourself going into a situation like this and want more information please reach out). I felt weak and tired. When Adam picked me up he said he’d never seen me look so pale.

Recovery was less than ideal. For me, this was the hardest part of my entire cancer treatment. I had drains to remove the fluid from my chest (for about a week), I couldn’t lift my arms up, I had to sleep on my back, I was on a lot of pain meds, and it lasted about a month.

I’m not saying this to complain but to express how not fun this part was. Staying positive was hard. I think that’s why I didn’t even write a post about it. I felt traumatized and wasn’t ready to relive it yet.

Update on My Lemons

After surgery, I would see my plastic surgeon to get my expanders filled. This is just as weird as it sounds. Each expander has a little port that she would stick a need in, yes right on my chest, and push in saline solution with a syringe. Luckily because of the double mastectomy, I didn’t have and still don’t, have much feeling on my chest. Again very strange.

So I guess one of the positives to all of this is I got to pick the exact size of the implants I wanted. Once the expander was the size I wanted we just stopped filling and if I felt they were too big we could take some out. Then I had to wait a few months for the size to settle in.

That brings me up to today.

My second.

Happening in just over two weeks. Am I excited, yes and no. Happy to be done, but also not looking forward to it. It will be different this time. I’ll save space to share more on that later.

-e