And they're Off...Surgery!

Its difficult to even put into words what was going on in my mind the hours leading up to surgery. But I am forever grateful that I had an amazing corporate event in Nashville the week leading up to it because it was a wonderful, fun loving distraction from the mess that was going on in my head.

This is the step that I was hoping for in the beginning. After being diagnosed with breast cancer, I immediately thought to myself “Just hack them off. I don’t need them or want them anymore.” But fortunately, (unfortunately in my mind at the time) that wasn’t an option. I needed to go through 20 weeks of chemo before having surgery. Now looking back, I’m glad that I did. By going through chemo first, it allowed the drugs to not only prevent the cancer from spreading, but significantly reduce the size of the tumors and therefore make the surgery much less invasive.

My surgery was at 8am on Friday, August 10th so Paul and I had to get to the hospital at 6am for check in. I wasn’t super nervous on the drive into the hospital, but it was a very quiet drive…I think Paul was a little sleepy still from the long week in Nashville and the 4:30am wake up call. :) It wasn’t until I had to change into the surgery gown that the nerves started to rush over me. I hadn’t ever really thought about “bad news” coming out of surgery. The “What if…” questions started to flood into my mind. “What if they find it everywhere?” “What if the chemo didn’t work?” “What if they have to take A LOT of my lymph nodes?” “What if I don’t make it out of surgery?” All of these questions started rustling around in my mind so my legs started to do their nervous shake. Paul knows exactly what I’m talking about…my legs have a tendency to shake when I’m nervous, which makes it absolutely impossible to hide my anxiety.

To make matters worse, it was now time for the IV. OH GOODNESS! This girl does not do well with needles…I mean I handled chemo just fine because they were able to use my port in my chest, but ughhhh…I don’t do well with needles at all. So the IV nurse came in and started to prep me for the IV. I was okay for the first 30 seconds…okay, I take that back…more like 10 seconds. Then the room started to go black and Paul and the nurse’s voices started to sound like the teacher on Charlie Brown - “waaaa waaaa waaaa”. I was going to pass out! They laid my chair back and started to fan my face. Phew! It worked…I didn’t pass out, but my face was as white as the sterile walls.

The Doctors eventually came in to review the procedure and what recovery would look like afterwards. Then this nurse walked by a few times, nearly peaking into our room. Then he knocked on the door and there was a friend of mine from college. He said he was hoping that it wasn’t the same Barbie Bexell from college. He was going to be my nurse anesthetist during my procedure. For some this might be weird because he’s going to see my boobs get hacked off, my bald head and probably see me in the worst shape of my LIFE. But if you can’t tell by now, I like to look on the bright side of things (most of the time). I took this as a sign from God that he brought Erik as my nurse that day for comfort and love. Erik knew me and I knew that he would take care of me and (literally) watch over me during surgery.

They swept me off into the surgery room with nurses and doctors running around, which seemed to me in chaos, but I was pretty confident that they knew what they were doing. :) They gave me a drug to make me drowsy and soon I was fast asleep…

Meanwhile, Paul was in the waiting room getting electronic updates on where they were in the surgery. After the Surgeon was done, he came out and told Paul how the surgery went. He said “Very Successful” and that they “didn’t find any visible cancer in the lymph nodes or breast tissue” and that the “chemo must have done it’s job, because there was a lot of scar tissue near the location of the tumor.” There was a war between the tumor and the chemo and my breast was the battle ground. Thankfully the chemo and my strong body WON!

After surgery was a total blur, I ended up throwing up a bit so they gave me another drug that literally knocked me out for the rest of the day. Paul was there in the room with me, but I was in and out of consciousness. He decided to go home and sleep instead of trying to sleep on the folding chair in the corner of the room. :)

He came back the next morning, I had a vague memory of him telling me how surgery went, but I couldn’t remember much. He told me…everything that I wrote above AND with a witty grin he said “Oh yeah, they couldn’t save your nipples though. So they gave you donor ones!” My eyes nearly bugged out of my face! WTF!!! He cracked and busted out laughing. What a jerk! But at least we could laugh about everything what we’d just been through.

We got discharged later that day. I was managing the pain with a lot of pain meds, but I hate the feeling when I’m on them so I tried to ween myself off them pretty quickly. There was a woman in the Twin Cities area that has a few “Healing Chairs” that she loans out to women who are recovering from breast cancer surgery, so we had a big black leather chair that I slept in for the first week after surgery. It was extremely helpful as getting in and out of bed is not easy after surgery. My kids enjoyed playing with the buttons that moved the chair up and down - that’s for sure!

Since I only had 2 lymph nodes removed during surgery, my recovery was much smoother than other women’s double mastectomy’s. My range of motion was pretty good after only 1 week.

Now the drains…that’s a whole other blog entry!!

Nashville 2 days before surgery