First Update

Once again, I thought I’d wait a little longer before making an update, but I find myself with a lot of free time on my hands and not a lot of range of motion in my arms. I pretty much have my bed pillow fort for night and my couch pillow fort for day, and I can only leave those for short periods of time to use the bathroom or maybe sit at the kitchen table to eat. I’m already getting pretty bored, so I decided to see how I did sitting at the computer for a little while.

I successfully made it through my double mastectomy on Thursday and stayed in the hospital until 5:00 on Friday. I lost enough blood that they were on the fence about giving me a blood transfusion and they were not able to put any saline into my expanders during the surgery because the blood flow to my nipples was iffy, but I would call these pretty minor setbacks in the grand scheme of things. They didn’t do the blood transfusion and just watched me in the hospital a bit longer than planned. I have to have nitroglycerin cream put on my nipples every few hours to encourage blood flow, but it seems to be working, and they look healthy now. Hopefully, they can start filling my expanders on Wednesday. The only other issue I’ve had is swelling in my arms and legs, but it’s not too terrible.

It melted my heart to get flowers from the other WV Enduro ladies before I even got home from the hospital.

I’ve now spent two nights at home and my main issues are pain management and boredom. The pain is actually worse than I was expecting, because the women I talked to made the actual pain part seem not that bad. I’m definitely struggling with it, and I’m maxing out my allowed pain med dosages. I look and smell terrible, but I’m not feeling well enough to care yet. My first shot at a shower is Wednesday, if my drains slow down enough to come out by my first check-up with the plastic surgeon. I will hopefully also get my pathology results that day. I’m not too worried about those, but it will be nice to have 100% confirmation that I don’t need any other treatment.

Frank has been amazing at doing all the annoying little things that I need done like handing me anything that isn’t within my very limited range of motion, helping me in and out of bed, changing my drains, and putting on my nipple cream. The dude definitely deserves an award for this, but so far the best I could do was encourage him to go out for an hour when they tapped a new keg of Hopslam at a local bar. His mom is also staying with us, so she’s been able to back him up if he needs to leave the house.

So that’s where I am three days post-surgery. I hope to give some good reports regarding drains and pathology later in the week.