My surgery was last Monday. It lasted over eight hours and involved some "fancy stitching," according to my plastic surgeon. They make new breasts from several places--back, butt or tummy. My tummy seemed to have the most amount of tissue available, but I'm not a very large person so it was hard to come up with enough tissue. Nonetheless, I now have a new breast stump. I also have a very, very painful wound on my stomach. I don't know if people do tummy tucks anymore or if liposuction is the method of choice, but I'd never do this just to have a smaller tummy area.
I'm not sure what they did to me in the operating room, but my right arm was bruised from the wrist to the elbow on the inside of my arm. They used my right arm for the i.v. lines. I'm right handed, but because my sentinal node biopsy surgery was on the left-hand side, they will never be able to use that arm for blood pressure checks or needle sticks of any kind. When I woke up in the recovery room, I thought I heard someone say "He's dead." That seems pretty dramatic, so I could be wrong. People do die in surgery, though, so who knows.
The pain was extraordinary and immediate. My mother said that, as they wheeled me out of the recovery room, she could see tears rolling down my face. They just parked me in my room, hooked me up to all of the i.v. stuff and left me to my own suffering. My mom was with me, though, so I wasn't completely alone. I had a self-administered morphine injection (who knows if that's the right word) system. I had a button that would periodically light up. Whenever that happened, I could push the button and have more morphine. I was always in pain, anyway, no matter how many times I pressed the button. Intense, inescapable pain.
Around the middle of the night on Monday, they came for one of their regular vital signs/ wound inspection visits, turned me over and found I'd been bleeding for quite a while. The i.v. had slipped or something and I was lying in my own blood. "You've lost a lot of blood," one of the nurses said. For some reason, I took this as a criticism. The room filled with people and someone came by to move the i.v. line to the bend of my right arm. Then they had to move me to get me off of the bloody sheet. That whole process was indescribable. There was nothing to be done for it, though, other than to try to hang in there. After that, I didn't have any more trouble with bleeding, but there were more i.v. problems later on. I'll have to get to all of that later.
I'm completely exhausted. I got out of the hospital on Saturday, rode home for five hours in the rain on Sunday and I've been in too much pain to write until now. Thank you so much to everyone who checked in and sent me messages! I haven't had the time to read through all of them, but I feel so grateful that there are people who care about how I'm doing. I'm not sure if I'll be online later. It's hard to judge my future energy level. I'm fine, though, so if I'm not around it's just because I'm in pain or tired. I'm thinking of all of you and it cheers me up so much! See you later.
