1 week to go

So a week from now I will probably be taking my night before shower with my special soap the plastic surgeon gave me.  This is probably going to be the longest week ever!  And maybe the shortest when it's done (funny how that works).

I had my hospital preop and my breast surgeon preop today.  I found out all the details  OH Shoot, i just realized I forgot a question I meant to ask.  Is it even worth asking if it doesn't make a difference?  Hmmm maybe I'll email her.... ANYWAY, I guess I found out almost all the details.

Monday afternoon I will go into the hospital to "Nuc Meds" to get radioactive dye injected into each of my breasts.  I will then hang out for a couple hours while the dye travels it's way through my breast tissue to my lymph nodes to identify "The Sentinel Node(s)".  They will then do some scans to insure the injections did their job.

Tuesday morning, I will go to the rear entrance (ER entrance) of the hospital at 7am and use my "Express Admit" aka "Hall Pass" to go up to the second floor and get things started for my surgery time of 9am. 

Basically what I was told by the nurse at preop is that a nurse will come in and have me change my clothes and ask me a bunch of questions, then anesthesia will come in and give me an IV and ask me a bunch of questions, at some point my surgeons will come in and draw on me and see how i'm doing, then I'll get something in my IV to relax me, we'll go to the operating room and get me situated on the table and next thing I know I'll be waking up 8 hours later with nurses asking me a bunch of questions.  I'll spend an hour in recovery and then be taken to my room where my family can join me. 

Not sure how I feel about having to be awake going into the operating room... Now that I'm really concentrating on it I do have some vague memory of it now with my other general anesthesia surgeries.. kind of creepy.

So the for the 8 hours of surgery - I really have 7 1/2 if everything takes exactly how long they said it would.  So 45 minutes for sentinel node biopsy for each side (1 1/2 hours total).  Then 1 1/2 hours per breast for the mastectomy (3 hours).  And 1 1/2 hours per breast for expander placement reconstruction (3 hours).

There was a moment in the hospital today that I was a little concerned... The preop nurse was looking through my stuff and said "okay so on Tuesday we're going to be doing bilateral reconstructive surgery with expander placement with Dr. W?".  and I thought a minute and realized they had only ever to that point mentioned the plastic surgeon.  so I said "after I have a bilateral mastectomy with Dr. P...."  and she looks surprised and looks at the paper and says "Oh what, you're doing both at the same time??"   "yes....."  Then she found the other surgery paperwork and all was good.  Had me a little worried though for a minute (thank goodness for preop - I'd prefer to avoid that kind of confusion on surgery day!)

My hormones are out of whack... probably the stress.  It feels like boobs are aching in anticipating of this.  They are incredibly sore.  A friend pointed out today that after next week I won't have this problem anymore!  Way to find the silver lining!   That works for me.  I just need to get through this week without losing my mind.