Surgery Info
Greetings Faithful Readers-
Sorry to have been away so long. Lots of things have been going on, some good and some awful; I’ll get to those in another blog or two later. I just want to catch up on the details of my mastectomy for those of you playing along at home.
Surgery is scheduled for March 17th. Yes, St. Patrick’s Day. No corned beef and cabbage and green beer for me this year. I’ll be lucky if they bring me some green Jell-O. I have to be at the hospital at the ungodly hour of 6:45 a.m., and surgery is scheduled to begin at 8:00 a.m. It’s supposed to be a two to three hour procedure, then I’ll go to recovery, and from there to a room. If all goes well, they’ll keep me overnight and send me home on the 18th.
I’ve been going through the usual battery of pre-operative tests to make sure I’m healthy enough for surgery. I’ve had my heart scanned and my chest x-rayed; next week I’ll have my blood tests and the feared radioactive tracer injection. I’m really dreading the latter. It’s an injection straight into my breast, so they can see if my lymph nodes light up. (The optimal result is that they do not glow.) I’ve heard this shot packs quite a wallop. Supposedly, they are going to give me shots to numb my breast. They better. They’d better have a gallon of lidocaine there ready to shoot into me. If it hurts, I’m going to chew their internal organs out. That’s on Wednesday, the day before my operation. I guess I go in, they shoot in the tracer, and then I go have lunch and come back two hours later to have them take scans and see if anything fluoresces.
Then I go in Thursday morning, and she removes my breast through a honking big incision, and pulls out three of my sentinel lymph nodes to send down to pathology for a biopsy. What I don’t understand is, if she’s going to do that, why do I have to have the tracer shot? Maybe I should call. I’m sure Anne, the nurse would looove to talk to me yet again. Anyway, if my nodes are clean, then they won’t take out any more of them, which is a good thing. She’ll stitch me up, insert the drains, and send me off to recovery.
I’m not thrilled about the drains, either. Two weeks of goo-dripping tubes hanging off the front of me. Yippy skippy. However, she has assured me they don’t stink, so at least I won’t be repulsing people wherever I go. Then after two weeks, if all goes well (have you noticed how often I say that?), she’ll take out the stitches and the drains (ick) and I’ll just have to finish healing.
I’m mostly busy trying not to freak out over the fact that I’m going to have an amputation, and trying not to worry about dying during the operation. The last time I got operated on, I nearly bled to death, so I’m not exactly sanguine (yes, pun intended) about this little foray into slice and dice. I’ve been looking at some pictures of mastectomies on the Internet, and it is One Bloody Surgery. Fascinating photos, though. Better than zombie movies.
An anecdote: I was telling the surgeon that I had been looking at pictures on the Web, and she said, “Oh, no, you shouldn’t be doing that!” Then she laughed and said, “I forgot I was talking to a horror writer.” Then she told me that when she and her husband starting dating while she was in med school, he asked her why she had decided to specialize in surgery, and she told him that she just loved to get inside folks and look around. He replied, “I’m so glad there’s a legal way for you to satisfy those urges, honey.”
So that’s where we are as of today. I’ll keep you posted as to how things go, and I’ll let you know if the tracer injection is torture or not. Of course, if you hear on the news that a group of radiologists was ripped apart bodily at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Indianapolis, you’ll already know the answer. :)