Again

So we scheduled the mastectomy for December 18^th, 2006.  I called my Mom and my Grandfather and told them what was going on and they arranged their flights to come from California and Florida respectively.  I cried a lot and worried a lot and remember I was pregnant so I was also insane with emotions.  Thank G-d for my husband, who was and is my rock.

I talked with one of the women who works for my breast surgeon and she suggested some clothing that I would be able to wear right after surgery.  See, you can’t wear a prosthesis right after surgery because they are relatively heavy and the mastectomy area is sensitive, so there are several companies that cater to women post surgery and I went to the store that my doctor’s office suggested.  So I made an appointment and my hubby and I went to the store to check out they had for me.  Yeah, pregnant and fat sort of limited my options but we found a nice sort of cami/vest thing, with pockets for what’s called a fluff (which is like a small round pillow to sub for your breast) and for the drains.  Wait, drains?  What do you mean drains?  Maybe I should have asked more questions, maybe my doc should have explained more, whatever the case the word drain freaked me out just a little. 

The doctor puts a number of tubes in your chest around the surgery site and at the end of the tubes are like bulbs the purpose of which is to drain the fluid (lymph and whatnot) that builds up in the chest post surgery.  All I could think of was, “great where there is supposed to be a breast there wont be and I’ll have a bunch of other lumps where there shouldn’t be any, I’m going to look like a monster.”  A silly thing to be worried about when your talking about living or dying but what people forget is that initially cancer does not hurt and you feel fine and the only tangible thing to worry about is what you’re going to look like without a breast, without hair, with weird drains under your clothes, etc.  So we bought these really expensive cami/vest things, of course anything that specialized is going to be expensive, and I spent a week worrying and feeling my little dude kick around inside me, which just made me worry more.

Speaking of the little guy, my surgeon asked me if we’d found a doctor to keep an eye on the tadpole during surgery, something that hadn’t really thought about.  My OB was at another hospital and had mentioned trying to get permission to practice at the hospital where I was having surgery but we never heard anything else about it.  My surgeon recommended an OB/GYN that had helped her in the past and we made an appointment to meet with him, which opened a whole other can of worms.   The Friday before my surgery my husband and I met with him essentially to discuss at what point it was okay to let our son die.  There are a number of things that can go wrong during surgery, though they rarely happen, and you have to figure out how much you want the doc to monitor the fetus.  Now you can have constant fetal monitoring but that presents the issue of over reacting, if the baby’s heart rate drops a little too much the doctor might wig out and stop my surgery to perform a c-section unnecessarily.  You can have intermittent monitoring, in which case you may miss whatever is going to happen (if something is going to happen) and discover the fetus is in danger too late and put the mother at risk when there is nothing that can be done for the baby.  Or you can just hope for the best and check on the fetus before surgery and then again after, which is the option we choose.  I know that it sounds like a little too little, but after talking to our maternal fetal medicine specialist we felt like we were pretty safe in doing it that way.  He told us that in the 17 years that he has been practicing medicine that he has never had to do an emergency c-section on a woman going into scheduled surgery.

My Mom and Grandfather came in that weekend and on Monday we went to the hospital.