After Surgery...

Well, today is one week post surgery, and I must say I did not think I would be feeling this good! I have not taken my prescription pain meds for over two days and am relatively comfortable. I just got my last drain taken out and it is wonderful to not have tubes to take care of and worry about the kids grabbing.

I will summarize the last week and a half.

Last Thursday we met with my surgeon and plastic surgeon's teams, just to make sure we all were on the same page with what to expect for surgery. Then we went over to the hospital and got some radioactive injections, so they would be better able to find the lymph nodes during surgery.

We were at the hospital bright and early Friday morning. We met a couple who is a few years into a similar situation and had some prayer time. My husband and two of my brothers kept me company while I was waiting for surgery. Then they took me back to preop, gave me some preemptive pain medication and a few shots in the back to deaden my chest nerves for up to two days. I think it was about 10:30 when I got into the operating room. The next thing I knew, I was waking up and it was 5:00.

Going into surgery, the plan was to do immediate reconstruction, but unfortunately that was not possible. They found cancer so close to the skin layer (they said they have never seen it that close without seeing symptoms of it on the skin), that they ended up removing an area of skin. Since the skin was thinned out so much and had additional wounding to heal up, the plastic surgeon decided it would be best to delay reconstruction.

I spent the night in the hospital and was discharged around 2:00 p.m. on Saturday. The next few days I spent mostly lounging on the couch or sleeping in bed at my brother's house. I had very little pain until Tuesday afternoon during one of our drain tube cleaning sessions and felt this intense burning pain that wrapped from underneath my arm and around my back. It literally felt like my back was in flames for about 15 minutes. I quickly took a pain pill and waited for it to kick in and then we called the surgeon's team. We were told that more then likely, it was an inflamed nerve that the drain tube was irritating. This pain continued to happen every time we tried to clean the drain. This same day we got the call from genetics saying my genes testing showed that I did not have the brca-1 or brca-2 gene mutations. This is excellent news, for myself and many of my first degree relatives!

Wednesday morning we woke up and packed our car for home, and then headed to Mayo for our post operative check. The surgeon was extremely pleased with how well the incisions were healing and I got one of my two drains removed. They also told us we could be done "stripping" the remaining drain tube as that was causing excruciating pain and they felt the drain was maintain well enough on its own. They were also very pleased with the pathology results. All of the margins on the cancer were excellent! My "worse" margin was more then double of what they consider a good margin to be. My final lymph node tests came back with no indication of cancer. With all the information gathered thru surgery, they have ranked my cancer as Stage 1, which has an excellent prognosis! We were so happy we had a celebratory lunch at Red Lobster on the way home. We had a lot of reasons to celebrate. We arrived home Wednesday evening.

It is so nice to be home, but it is hard to be Mom, yet not be able to "do" Mom things. My oldest had a hard time with us being gone and missed us very much. She informed me "Mom, I missed you so much, that I just went in your closet and cried. You've been gone too long. Don't ever leave me again!" all thru a flood of tears. Our next oldest has been getting tummy aches (what happens when he is worried) and came home from school yesterday and ran to his room and bawled. He said he didn't know why he was so sad, but just needed to cry. Our little ones are having a hard time with not being able to be "up" with Mommy. But I guess all this is part of what we have to go thru.

We have to return to Mayo in a couple of weeks to meet with Oncology and set up any additional treatment plans which may be needed.