Surgery Day

Got up very early the day of surgery.  I need to be there by 7:00 am.  First thing I needed to do was go to get another Mammogram and get a wire put in that would be a guide for the doctor.  Adrian was there for Hans.  Daryl was going to be, but he got a call to go in for Overtime.  I told him to go.


Surgery went well. Hans and Adrian were there when I woke up.  By 3:30 pm I was getting ready to go home. Adrian had just left when they let me go.  Hans was relieved that we could go home together. The details are still fuzzy to me. 

Here's what was done:

7:00 am check-in-smooth.

9:30 am Stint put in-This helps the doctor to be able to go in to the right place to do the surgery.  A dye is also injected to lead to the lymph nodes to take out.

10:30 am Surgery (actually 11 am.  There was some mix up on the order of Meds).

All was well, we were on the way home.  Hans made the calls, sent the text to people on the list.  He hung up on the last call and then my son Daryl called.  He had car problems.  I told him I'd be all right and he should go help him.  I tried to sleep a bit.  My left breast started hurting a bit before he left.  I knew he'd be back as soon as possible.  Hans managed to talk Triple A into letting him leave the card with my son and being able to get back to me.  By the time he got home, I couldn't stand the pain any longer.  My left breast got bigger and bigger while the right one, that had the cancer deflated.  The cold and hot treatment did not work out so well.  By the time Hans got back he'd already called Dr. Bowling and she had called him back.  If it got worse, I was to come in to ER.  Well, it got worse.  I looked like I had a bad boob job.  I got dressed again and we headed back to the hospital.

I guess I was very dehydrated.  I had major cotton mouth.  The only thing I had eaten was chicken soup when I got home.  I was not very hungry.  The soup was light and water was the only thing I had ingested.  This was good, because I was about to go back into surgery.  In the ER, the nurse wanted me to get on the scale.  No way I told her.  I was not moving out of that wheel chair.  I gave her the weight from earlier.  She took it.  I kept asking for something to clean my mouth out with.  No one would give it to me.  For crying out loud, I knew I couldn't suck the water out because of the surgery.  But a wet rag would have been nice.  So when the room nurse left, I begged Hans to give me some wet paper towel.  That was all I needed.  He threw it away before the nurse came back in.  I still wasn't given anything for pain for a while. The attending doctor finally got a hold of the Dr. Bowling and she gave them the instructions to keep me comfortable.  She was 10 minutes away.

Finally! IV for the pain medications. We knew there would be a bit of swelling to deal with after the surgery.  But this was ridiculous.  It went way beyond a little bit of swelling.  My left breast that had the suspicious mass removed was like the size of an M cup.  My right one that we thought would have problems was like that of a C cup.  This was normally a D cup the last few years.   When Dr. Bowling got there, pain meds were ordered and pain was masked.  What a relief.  My poor husband was so tired by this point.  I felt bad for him.  He had been up since 4 am at least, maybe longer. 

I will have more to update.  But I have been trying to stay up long enough to be able to focus.