Monday morning came around and before heading off to see my surgeon, my Aunt made us a great breakfast. This gave me a bit of time to write out a list of questions to ask during my appointment – get a few things off my mind and add any other questions her or Cayley felt were important.
We first hit up my plastic surgeon’s office. To avoid confusion, I’ll call her the Plastic Surgeon (or PSurg) and my “removal” surgeon can be the “Surgeon”. I needed to sign off on consent forms for the PSurg part of my operation.
We then picked up my Dad and headed to the Surgeon’s office. I have done a lot of waiting in the past 6+ months in a lot of waiting rooms – and most of the time, I don’t mind…unless it’s getting really long, but for the most part, it’s not so bad. But what I find hard sometimes is that people want to talk to me. It depends who is with me, but for the most part, I’m happy to sit there in silence with my thoughts. I don’t want a running conversation – it’s still super hard to process that all this is happening, so to make some small talk often is just too much. Maybe silence makes other people uncomfortable, but right now, I think I just need that small moment of waiting to sort out what I need to.
Anyways, it was my turn to head into the Surgeon’s office and the three of us sat down. The Surgeon wanted to take a look at me so we pulled aside a curtain so she could take a peek. She was asking me a few things during the whole time, but I swear Dad and Cayley thought that curtain drown out their conversation as well…all I could hear was them talking about sports. So if you can imagine, I’m lying on the examination table, the doctor is doing her thing, and I have to stop her mid-sentence and tell the boys to pipe down!
She said she thought the site looked and felt a lot better. Cayley ran through the list of questions I had written down – I just couldn’t bring myself to talk. I could feel tears coming but I tried really hard to hold them at bay, and my silence seemed to be the only way to do it.
I managed to eek out one question and asked her if this (this being a mastectomy) was still the best way to go. Maybe I was hoping we could change it. The finality of it all just seemed way too close. Her opinion was that it’s best to proceed as we don’t want to miss anything and have to go through this again.
I thanked the doctor, told her I’d see her on the 22nd, and left to head home to Kelowna. I cried the whole way to Abbotsford. Not constant crying, but every few minutes I would just start quietly sobbing. I don’t know what I was expecting – I mean, I’ve kinda known this would happen since April – but it just seemed to hit me much harder than I thought.
The last three days have been very hard emotionally too. Crying takes over at a moment’s notice and I can’t stop. My allergic reaction has come back and my throat was a bit sore, my face very blotchy and red, and I just have no appetite.
Today feels a lot better and I feel like I have been told/given some tools to help me get through this next part. I’m going to try and find a physio person to see if I can do any pre-surgery exercises I can do to help aid my recovery. I’m going to make a list of questions I still might have about my surgery and get them answered. I’m going to chat with the ladies at the Breast Reconstruction group I have been going to and see what they say. But mostly, I think I’m just going to try and relax and take care of myself these next few weeks in preparation for a few weeks of recovery.
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