One Week Out ...

Since surgery, which was on Friday October 12th.

Mom, Dad, Blake and I spent all day the Thursday before doing pre-op appointments and then met Rigo for dinner that night. We ended up at the hotel and poor little Blake and his mommy were both so exhausted that getting to sleep surprisingly wasn't that hard.

My alarm clock went off at 4:00 am. Dad and Rigo took me to the hospital at 6:00 am. I took my precious little time showering and thinking; thinking a lot in the shower, and of course, doing my fair share of crying too. Showers are always a difficult time I find for myself and for my other friends living with cancer. It is that sense of being alone that is overwhelming and ability to let all our emotions go. I said my good-bye's to my sweet sleeping baby and my mother. That was hard. You know, to say good-bye to your mother knowing the next time you see her your entire femininity will have been erased, and not gently erased, scrubbed off with purpose and zeal. Now that I am a parent myself, I see the pain in my parents faces so much more clearly.

We arrived at the hospital a little early (see earlier post) despite the heavy rains coming down. Once 7am came around, we checked into surgical admitting. The entire day was so very surreal and for the sake of sharing, educating and preserving the moment, I'd like to document as much detail as possible, but there is so much of me that wants to forget it all ... the thought of reliving that day takes so much energy, energy I simply don't have right now. Hence, I just had to take a 2 hour nap and now I am back at this blog. I have a feeling this blog will take about two days to write!

Okay, we will do document this step by step, slowly and as best as I can remember. I was taken back to the pre-op room about 15 after the hour by a young nurse, without Rigo or Dad. She didn't let me know where we were going or what to expect aka she had some pretty bad bedside manner.

Let's just get this off my chest from the get go ... Stanford's bedside manner sucks ... their failure to communicate with patients is detrimental to the patients physical an mental well-being and recovery. With so many of the challenges I faced, this surgery could have and should have been much smoother with a little bit of effort on Stanford's part to communicate clear expectations to me. Am I upset about it? No, not really. I expected this in part due to my prior appointments with them, due to the nature that they are a massive facility treating thousands of patients a day and because I was working with two surgeons who both felt they were running the show.

Anyhow, I was taken back into a triage-type room with all the patients waiting to have surgery for the day. I was given a gown and disposable socks to wear and instructed to remove all of my clothing and jewelry (wedding ring included and getting that off is a feat in of itself since the blessing of the baby). My breasts were being removed, okay, so I needed to take my bra off, but I was so confused why I couldn't wear underwear. I mean, leave a woman with no dignity whatsoever. Ugh, as typical, I complied and off with the chonies. This all made so much more sense when I woke up with a catheter.

I spent the next hour or so answering admitting questions with nurses, being examined by both surgeons and their teams of doctors and meeting the anesthesiologists. The sense that Rigo and I both got about my surgeons were that a) they don't work together very often, b) they wanted to kill each other and c) my general surgeon, the woman, would win. Let's just say the tension rose a few notches when they were in the room together with me. Despite their own personal difficulties with each other, I felt very confident in my team of doctors. Each surgeon had their own team of residents working with them, very Grey's Anatomyish ... most of the residents were from Stanford, but I also had visiting residents working on me from Yale and Harvard ... hello! I couldn't have felt any better about our team! Go Team!

Although surgery was slated to begin at 9am, it didn't begin until 10am because we had to wait for an operating room to free-up. In the interim, both surgeons took the Nip-Tuck approach and made their own individual markings on my body and breasts with a Sharpie marker of where the incisions would be made. It looked so freakish ... I mean, cool in a freakish way, but so very disturbing at the same time. Nonetheless, I asked Rigo to take a picture of the markings before I went into the operating room. It was a little funny when the lead nurse walked over first thing in the morning and confirmed the surgery location by writing "YES" on each breast ... as if there was going to be one of those surgical mistakes you hear about on the news ... the only mistake you could make in my case would be to let me keep one of the girls. Yep, they were both going.

So, after all the meeting with the doctors, all the preparation, I was ready to go back. I loaded on my red lipstick (Chanel Spark ... love it), said my tearful goodbye to Rigo and was taken back to the very cold operating room. I do not remember much of anything back there. I remember counting about 6 people back there, but none of them were my surgeons, all other staff. I remember the anesthesiologist spreading my arms out and positioning them for the surgery and I remember him telling me I was going to sleep and off I went ... sound asleep.

I woke up nearly 10 hours later even though to me it felt like two minutes later. I was in another triage-type recovery room. With it being so late in the night, it was only me and one other woman who were there recovering from surgery. Speaking of this woman, I wanted to throw a bottle at her head she wouldn't stop screaming in pain and moaning ... hello, your screams weren't making the pain go away and if anything, you are just making it so much more miserable for EVERYONE else around you aka me! The nurse ran over and told me I just got out of surgery. I was in such a fog, was she right? I didn't think I had even started the surgery yet? It went so fast. I couldn't talk, my throat was all messed up since the tube was down my throat for so long so as a way to ascertain whether this again-not-so-comforting nurse was right, I felt for my breasts .... AAAHHHH ... she was right. I was done with surgery. I felt the worst pain and pressure ever ... and then crazy curious me, I tried to take a sneak peak under my gown. No breasts. I had no breasts. But thank God all I saw were bandages, so I wasn't too traumatized, yet! But it was clear, no breasts.

Somehow I did manage to ask the nurse to either shut that other woman up, which they couldn't, or find me a pair of earplugs, which they did. I put the earplugs in right away ... really, these were the only things keeping me from harming her ... she was such a pain in the neck, I truly wanted to hurt her and I never get like that ... I am sure it was the medicine taking over, but thank goodness for earplugs!

Minutes later, like two minutes later, I began to throw up all over. I couldn't call for the nurses help because I couldn't talk and no one was helping me since all the nurses were trying to calm down this way over the top melodramatic patient. So much for behaving ... you don't get any help. It wasn't until my guts started coming up that one of the nurses tossed, yes, tossed me a pan. Luckily I didn't need anyone's help to hold my hair back (yes, that was a joke).

It was about 8:30, 9:00 pm and the nurses said my room was ready. I was going to be wheeled via gurney to my room and it was then that I would get to see Rigo and Blake and my parents. Immediately, once the main double doors opened, there was Rigo, smiling at me. If I had enough energy, I would have cried, but instead, I mustered up a half grin to let him know I was okay and then I closed my eyes to fall asleep.