Surgery Day.

I've gotten a little behind on my postings but I'm going to take a few minutes to get it updated for all of you as much has happened.

Surgery was scheduled for Tuesday, April 12th at 2:30 p.m. I had a lot of last minute things to do in the morning before going to the hospital so I was hurrying around.

I had received a phone message from the hospital Monday afternoon but my cell phone battery was dead so I didn't get the message. When I did get the message it was too late to call her back. The nurse who was calling wanted to go over medical history, etc. I was thinking it was no big deal. She calls me back Tuesday morning and we chatted. She wanted to confirm that I was going to be at the hospital at 10:45 a.m. for dye injections. Eek! Apparently, radiology was to have called me to let me know I was scheduled for an 11:05 appt. This changed a lot of things I had planned to do yet.

After her call Dr. Sorkhi called. He said he had been trying to reach me on Monday but again, I have a new iphone. The battery holds a charge about a few hours but quickly dies. Dr. Sorkhi starts out by saying "we have a small problem". This is something that is never good to hear just before surgery. I've been planning for weeks to make this all come together. I've rearranged my work schedule and interrupted the lives of a lot of people to make this happen.

Dr. Sorkhi received the lab results back on the breast lesion that was found on my left breast. The lesion showed that it was benign. It didn't seem like a big deal sign I was planning to have a bilateral mastectomy anyway.

Dr. Sorkhi then said that he would like to biopsy the lymph nodes on the left side to make sure the cancer was not in the nodes. However, if the lesion was benign he wasn't sure the insurance company would pay to have the nodes biopsied. I've dealt with a lot of insurance issues in the past so hearing this sent my blood pressure up about 10 points! Dr. Sorkhi started laying out my options starting with "we could postpone the surgery until we get another biopsy"!!  I thought to myself that there could be no situation that could come up that would cause me to postpone the surgery!

The bottom line was we agreed to do the double mastectomy and biopy lymph nodes on both sides.

While I was on my cell phone with Dr. Sorkhi, Dr. Batra's office called and wanted me to come in yet that morning. They wanted to mark my breasts so they knew where to make the incisions. Seriously, no one could call about this stuff the day before? I thought we could make it around noon but when I went to the hospital for the dye injections it took longer than expected. I then decided that I was the patient and Dr. Batra was the plastic surgery. If he wanted to draw pictures on my breasts then he needed to come to the hospital to do it!

I went to the hospital around 10:45 where they gave me the dye injections. The purpose was so the surgeon could see the direction of the flow through the lymph nodes. This would help them to see in which order to biopsy them. If the first few didn't show cancer they wouldn't need to remove them. I can't begin to tell you how painful it was to get the dye injections! They make four injections around the nipple area with a very fine needle. The needle wasn't the problem. The dye however, burns like fire! I think that paid was similar to the pain I had right after surgery!

The dye is blue. Through the day after surgery your kidneys filter it out of your body. It started out blue in color then turned to a very deep St. Patrick's Day green then bright Gatorade green a finally back to a normal yellow pee color! All of the nurses would come in a we would laugh about my pee colors!

I was wheeled into surgery around 2:30 p.m. and don't remember anything after 3:05. I do know they put the IV in my jugular vein! When I heard they were going to do that I told then that needed to happen AFTER I was put under. Now I look like I have a vampire bite on my neck.

Surgery took about 6 hours. The first thing they did was to biopsy the lymph nodes. The nodes on the left side were fine and didn't show any signs of cancer. I wasn't so lucky on the right side. They did show the cancer had moved into the lymph nodes so they were removed.

Courtney had nestled herself into a chair in the waiting area. Because I was the only one in the recovery room they let her come back to be with me. It was nice to have someone there to hold my hand.

As I awoke in the recovery room I was of course, in a lot of pain but my blood pressure was quite high (185 over 125). They tried several things to get it down but it kept going up again. Finally, the nurse called a nurse in the ER. She said to sit me up in bed. As soon as they did that it dropped significantly.

Around 1 a.m. they got me to my room and were still trying to get my pain under control. As it got closer to 2 a.m. I started getting a little relief. Courtney left at that point and went home to sleep. I managed to sleep for about an hour that night. I could only think about how the next day will be better!