In Part 2 of this story, I told you about my plastic surgeon who boasted over 10,000 breast reconstructions. When I first met with him, he told me that I would be “back to normal” in six months.
Spoiler: I was NOT “back to normal” six months later. I would never go “back to normal,” ever. I’m not sure that anyone does after a breast cancer diagnosis.
When I woke up from the anesthesia after my mastectomy, I remember two thoughts: 1. My chest looks surprisingly decent wrapped in an ace bandage. 2. I want to see my husband.
Recovery from the mastectomy took weeks. I had two drains coming out of my right armpit that I had to empty every day. I couldn’t lift anything. (I was used to picking my kids up every day). I moved in with my parents for a week so that they could care for me while my husband took care of the kids. When I came back home, I slept in my daughter’s double bed so that the girls could sleep in our bed with their dad. We were worried that they might kick or hit me in the middle of the night, so I had to stay by myself.
Two weeks after the mastectomy, I was at the hospital again, meeting with a Radiation Oncologist and Medical Oncologist. My course of treatment would be 8 sessions of biweekly chemo followed by 35 daily radiation treatments. I would also be visiting the plastic surgeon regularly so that they could inject saline solution into my tissue expander. This was a device that had been inserted under my chest muscle to stretch my skin and essentially make me a new breast out of the skin that was left on my chest after my surgery.
For the next six months, I kept going to work, parenting my kids, and visiting the hospital regularly. We even fit a trip to Disney World into the chaos. I’ll share more specific experiences from this time in future blog posts. It was an always stressful, often lonely, and physically painful journey.
Breast cancer is a journey that never really ends.
Once radiation therapy ended in June 2019, I was finally able to begin healing. Six months and lots of therapy, meditation, acupuncture, and Jin Shin Jyutsu later, I was taking Tamoxifen and ready for my boob job: it was time to replace my temporary tissue expander with a more permanent silicone implant.
Silicone implants are a lot softer than tissue expanders. They look and behave more like real breast tissue. I wasn’t getting just one, but two. My plastic surgeon recommended an augmentation on my left breast (the one that didn’t have cancer) so that it would better match my reconstructed right breast.
Things seemed to be going well, at first. Then in May of 2020, I became bedridden with a fever. I couldn’t move or do anything. My darling husband thought I had Covid, and kept everyone away from me. Finally I noticed how hot my chest was. It was streaked with red, and the incision across my right breast was oozing. I had an infection.
After a confusing round of phone calls with my oncologist, plastic surgeon, and the on-call plastic surgeon at the hospital, it was finally decided that I would come into the emergency room to have the implant removed.
And just like that, while I lay flat on my back under local anesthesia in the emergency room, the on-call plastic surgeon sliced open my offending, oozing incision, pulled the silicone implant out of my chest (cue sucking sound here – that’s what it really sounded like!) and threw it in the trash. He sewed me back up and sent me home to heal, again.
A month later, at my follow-up exam, my plastic surgeon proclaimed the explant (that’s what they call the removal of an implant) a success, and told me that I had to wait at least a year to fully heal before making any more decisions. I had one more option for reconstruction, he told me, or I could go on living flat on the right side, with one beautiful breast on the left.
And that is the story of how I ended up with one Fierce Tit.