On Thursday night my Dad drove me down to Vancouver to prepare for my upcoming plastic surgeon appointment on Friday. I got the call on Thursday morning that my appointment would now be at 745am in the surgeon’s office in downtown Vancouver, as opposed to 145pm at St. Paul’s hospital.
Despite the early time, that worked out better for me anyways…get it over with and get on with my day. So bright and early on Friday morning my Dad and two of my best friends accompanied me to Dr. Van Laeken’s office for my consultation.
I first met with a nurse who would be on my ‘surgery team’. She apparently has been in the OR a lot with my ‘removal’ surgeon and said that if anyone she cared about had to get this surgery done, she’d highly recommend my surgeon…nice to know she is so well respected!
The nurse then explained the two likely options I will have for surgery – a tram flap or implants – and then showed me before and after pictures of previous patients. She gave me a brief run-down of expected recovery, time in hospital, and other side-effects of both procedures.
I’ll be honest – I was a little stunned. Picture after picture came up on the screen and to me, nothing looked good. All I saw were big scars. With a few friends having had breast augmentation and no visible scars, I really was surprised at how big the scars on the pictures were. The nurse told me that most of the scarring would be underneath my breasts or covered by a nipple, but I just saw scars. Maybe those pictures were really soon after the surgery, but I got a little overwhelmed at how visible the scars would be. Until one of my friends mentioned that no one was really ever going to see the scars unless I showed them. Still…a little hard for me to take.
But if I thought scars were hard to take, I had seriously underprepared myself for what the nurse said next. She got up to leave and go get the surgeon and finished her part of the presentation with “so in total, you are looking at about 8 months until you are done.”
Pardon? 8 months? Months??? Seriously?
I guess I had it in my mind that I would have surgery, then recover for 4-6 weeks as told, and be done with surgery and move on. Guess not.
The surgeon came in next to talk to me and examine me. While this was my first time meeting her, she is actually a family friend on my Dad’s side and is really well-liked by our family. First thing I notice, her amazing dress. She looked great. But more than that, she drew respect and authority as she walked in. She was kind, direct, and very thorough while she was talking to me. She explained both options to me, examined what I currently look like, and then gave me her opinion.
Due a few factors (longer surgery, longer time in hospital, weaker abdominal wall, bigger breasts, etc) she recommended that I get an implant. After the mastectomy she would insert a tissue expander into my chest wall. It would then need to be slowly filled with fluid over a 3 month time frame until it got big enough to match my current breast size. Then I would go back in for surgery where they would remove the expander and insert a permanent implant.
Ultimately the choice is mine, but that’s what the surgeon recommends. It was a really hard appointment – especially hard to realize that this is going to take a lot longer than I originally thought. But I had great support in the room in my two friends and my Dad…I really am very lucky to have such amazing people surrounding me.
No comments:
Post a Comment