New Boobs!

Hi everyone. I thought now was a good time to give an update, because I have a date for my next surgery. I'm supposed to be working from home today (and I AM, I swear...) but we have contractors installing new windows and doors and I've been having to corral the kitties away from where they're working. Ever heard the phrase, "it's like herding kittens"? Yeah, that's what I'm doing today ;-)

So, anyway, I've been enduring my tissue expander fills for the last couple of months. Each one has been worse than the previous one. A lot of people have asked me how I'm doing, and how it feels. Ugh, it's far worse than any muscle pain I've ever felt. Surprisingly, the chest area doesn't hurt the worst - it's my back that's really been hurting (probably because my shoulders are hunched to ease the stretching in my pectoral muscles).

Just as a refresher... I have inflatable implants underneath my chest muscles, with a metal port under my skin at the top of my breast mound. Every 3 weeks or so, I go to the plastic surgeon to get them filled. He uses a weird magnet thing to locate the port and pokes a needle through it. Then he puts anywhere between 35 and 80 cc's of fluid in the implant, until I start to feel pressure. My boobs literally grow before our eyes :-)

It doesn't hurt right away. After a few hours I start to feel a burning in my back/shoulder area. Then it feels all knotted and twisted. I have to sleep in a reclined position for the first night or so because sleeping flat on my back really hurts. Ever since the last 2 fills, I've been uncomfortable pretty much 24/7. At night, my arm goes dead (not quite numb, but it feels heavy and hurting). So, I wake up every so often to change positions (but there are not really many positions I can tolerate!). During the day, it's very difficult to use my arms to prop myself up. It's not difficult lifting things, but for some reason the motion of pushing up with my arms is pretty difficult.

My right side seems to hurt the most. This is really strange, because that's the side that wasn't radiated. It might be because the muscle is softer and more flexible, so it seems that the implant has shifted a bit toward the armpit area. Seriously, I feel so broken :-(

So, anyway, you can see why I have been VERY anxious to get these things out of me. During my last fill, my plastic surgeon said that we could schedule the surgery soon. A week later (which was just this past Tuesday), I spoke to his secretary and she informed me that he had a cancellation, and he would be ready to do the surgery on March 30th!!

I have my pre-op testing tomorrow. My doctor informed us that this surgery should go a lot more easily than the last one. It should only take about 2 hours (versus the 6+ hours of the last one!) and best of all, I won't even have to stay overnight! Woohoo! Therefore, I think my chances of contracting C. Diff again are probably much less. I've also read that a lot of women actually feel better soon after surgery because the "turtle-shell" expanders are gone and replaced with soft implants.

This one is coming up a lot more quickly than I expected, but I'm really happy about it. I was thinking about this the other day and I realized that between my diagnosis, treatment, and first round of reconstruction, it's been just under a year! Wow.

Note that I say "first round of reconstruction". I'll post more on what I mean by that later. After my meeting with the plastic surgeon tomorrow, I'll have a better idea of what the different stages will look like. But the most important part is happening in less than 2 weeks!