The Breast Quest #11

Mission accomplished! Came home with most of the left side of my chest bandaged. Will be able to take the dressing off later today and shower.

The hospital let me keep my support hose and booties. Never thought I would actually own a pair of support hose. They use these to help keep blood clots from forming during surgery. They also wrapped my legs in these pads with tubes which inflate and deflate, like a massage to help with the prevention of clots. Very interesting.

The wire insertion was very unpleasant. Everything went fine until they injected the blue dye to stain the tissue. Felt like my whole chest was on fire! The needle was removed after the wire was put in, so I didn't have to wear a cone over the breast.

Radiologist and Anesthesiologist were reallly cute. If you're a female and you're going to have male doctors touching your breast, they have to be cute, right?

I remembered being wheeled into the operating room and it was freezing like they said it would be. We had music for the party but I don't remember what it was, darn it. They started up the leg massage, put something in my IV, put an oxygen mask on my face and that was all I remember. Don't remember getting sleepy at all, just went bye-bye. 2 hours later, I woke up in the recovery room feeling very sore, but the morphine helped. Came home with a prescription for percocet and crashed for 13 hours without taking even one pill.

Hope to get the pathology report back this week and have to see the surgeon within 10 days for follow-up. Stay tuned as you may hear our sassy and spunky heroine cussing a blue streak when she removes the tape from her arm where the IV was and most likely some arm hair as well.