Surgery Is Done

The surgery is over. I'm sorry I did not update sooner but I've been in the middle of a pain crisis and spent Tuesday and Wednesday in bed. Tuesday was because of after-affects of the surgery and Wednesday & Thursday was because I was in a LOT of pain.

For those who do not understand what a lumpectomy is I will explain. It simply means the removal of the entire lump and possibly some surrounding tissue. This way they have the entire lump to biopsy. I wanted this method of biopsy because I did not want to take the chance of getting a false negative which can occur with a needle or core biopsy (they are RARE [false negatives]).

The nurses and anesthesia people were all wonderful and supportive. One gentleman held my hand and talked softly to me while I fell asleep. I was deeply touched by them saying a prayer that the lump turns out to be benign (non-cancerous), it was really sweet. I was a tad annoyed that the surgeon did not speak to me at all except for saying hello when we passed each other in the hallway (he going to speak with another family and me going to give a urine sample). Every other surgery I have had, the doctor has always come to me while I was in pre-op being prepped to talk to me, answer any questions, and tell me what to expect. He was also very quick when speaking to my husband when the surgery was over and I was in recovery. Ron said he talked quickly and left quickly just saying "the surgery went well and she's in recovery". No time for questions or anything else. I really dislike doctors who act this way. It is like they forget we are people and see us as nothing more than an object or something.

If it turns out to be cancer, I will not be letting this surgeon handle the mastectomy. I would much rather have a surgeon that cares dealing with me for such an emotional operation. It is a big deal for a woman to lose her breasts and I don't want some guy who is in a rush and can't talk to his patients being the one to remove mine.

I now have a 3 inches (or so, didn't actually measure it) cut on my right breast that is held together with super glue. It is tender and sore but not too bad. I CAN stitch, which was really nice! My return appointment with the surgeon is on the 14th but he did say the results may be in Friday the 9th, or Monday the 12th, so I will be calling the office to see if the results are in and they'll give them to me over the phone. I seriously doubt they'll give them to me over the phone, but I figure it can't hurt to ask.

As to the pain crisis, I think it was caused by the surgical bed/table I was on and the hospital gurneys. None of them were comfortable and I had to lay flat on my back, which is painful to me anyway, for a few hours. I was out for about 2 hours. The table/bed thing (not sure what they call it) in the surgery suite was not very wide and they strapped my legs down out straight which really hurt. When I woke up in the recovery area there was a pillow under my knees but I don't know how long it was there. So I got 2 days stuck in bed due to pain, but I did manage to do some stitching yesterday, which was nice. Mostly I slept off and on, a few hours here, a few hours there and read or stitched when I was awake.

I woke up at 11:45PM Thursday night so now I am awake. Most likely I will not be able to go back to sleep and will have to try and make it through all of today (Friday) without a nap, specially since I have a 1PM doctor's appointment to discuss my thyroid blood test results. Yay fun ..not. LOL

Well that's it for me. I'm going to try to finish catching up on blog reading as I have 282 posts in Google Reader.