Sunday, June 23, 2013

The Reconstruction Era – Part 4

From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…
 
“It appears that the next event is breast reconstruction!”
 
Nope, STILL not it!
 
So, my wife is sitting across from me, watching golf, a bit over six days after surgery.
 
The tubes are still in – four of them for drainage of the surgical field. (It took me almost an HOUR to find the illustration above! Isn’t that crazy? But at least now you know!) Two will come out later this week, the other two until the drainage drops to near zero. They are there to clear fluid out that the body floods the incision area with. Normal it’s absorbed back into the bloodstream, but with major surgery, it overwhelms the system. The drains smooth things out and leave less behind for infection.
 
NOT that we don’t have to be concerned about infection.
 
And pain.
 
And maintenance.
 
At any rate. My wife was actually up enough yesterday to spend time with her sister and sister-in-law in a southern suburb of Minneapolis while my daughter and foster daughter went on a shopping mission to the Mall of America.
 
She was only able to stay for a couple of hours, but enjoyed herself immensely.
 
THAT of course, was in the middle of a power outage. The largest in Minnesota history...yahoo. You can bet that THAT induced a bit of neo-panic! That passed, but we’re left with a heat wave now. Several people will be stopping in to see my wife over the next few days and my daughter and I have easily taken on the role of grocery-shoppers and cooks; housekeeping and laundering; lawn-mowing and weeding; dog and cat feeding and grooming – all jobs my wife does with unstinting love.
 
All-in-all however, we’re surprised that she’s bounced back as quickly as she has. It’s not even a week yet – she went under Monday morning…she JUST said, “I can’t believe I had the surgery!”…even as I typed this. Plus, the surgeon thought she was SO concave chested that she gave her a small saline injection into the expanders – so she came back with boobs!
 
Even our daughter commented, “You’re showing a little cleavage there, Mom!”
 
So – stage two…or is it three or four?...seems to have reached some kind of completion. She is recovering and looking forward to the next step: saline into the expanders in order to stretch the skin in preparation for the implants themselves in November of December.
 
I’ll keep you posted and if you have any questions or comments, shoot them my way and I’ll try and answer them!
 

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