Surgery

My surgery was set up for July 15th at 9:45 am, my parents were here from Spain and my good friend Fiona was here from the UK. Alberto, Fiona and I went to the hospital at 7 am, it takes them time to get you ready so after preparation time I was taken to the operating room around 9:15 am.

When I woke up I felt terrible, I recall to look at the watch of the recovery room and it was almost 5 pm, my surgery had been over 6 hours!. I had double mastectomy with temporally expanders implant behind the muscle. The reason why they do that is to avoid the muscle to go all rigid after surgery and being difficult to manage if future reconstruction. Boy was I in pain?, they had real issues to control my pain that night even if I had blockers on my back. The following morning the Plastic surgeon changed medication and the pain started going away. I went home the following day with 4 drainers in my breast and tubes on my back, my mom was horrified as in Spain you will be hold in the hospital for at least 4 nights, here one night was more than enough. I was kind of happy to go home and have some sleep, it had been two weeks of non sleep and the strong medication was going to give me some help.

Looking back to surgery, I could not imagine how much my life had changed and how much I have already gone through in such a short period of time. I felt proud of how far I have come and how strong I was feeling. I was amazed how fast I was recovering from surgery, I went to Dr Karrin or Dr Lui's office almost every day and each day was feeling better. The harder part for me was the breast expanders as it bothers you a lot and it took me some time to get used to it. Another weird thing was the left arm pit, as they take out the lymph nodes your armpit is empty, until today I still have not got used to that sensation.

At one of Dr Karrin's visit we got pathology results from the surgery. We were very pleased to learn that there were not surprises and the 3 lymph nodes that the PET scan showed as affected were the only ones being positive for Cancer. We also learnt that all the margins were clear so they had taken out all the cancer in my body!!, that was a really good feeling and now it was time to put all the efforts on making sure it was not coming back. I had now been officially diagnosed with stage II Breast Cancer.