September 30, 2004
Issue 9

Late Night Edition
The Game is on!

The end of the Intra-Ductal* Tome
The Beginning Recovery Issue          

Dear Nipplemaniacs,

Thank you for all your love, support and great vibes. I just came back from the plastic surgeon where he mapped blue and green football-plays all over me.

(I couldn’t convince him to work on my face.                                                    )

Circles, squares, arrows, dots, dashes…I’m going for a touch-down. 5:00 A.M.

Send all that positive stuff!

I’m going in, baby!!

That night I looked at the markings all over me and tried to imagine how the dots would be connected, how I’d be spliced, patched, stitched, where the drains would be inserted.  I looked at my right breast which was becoming unrecognizable as a healthy part of my body I once knew.  I looked at it made peace with the upcoming loss, told myself that my life was more important than vanity.  I said good bye to my breast and thanked it for serving me well.

Then I looked at my sad tired face in the mirror.  I was beat from these months of stress and worry.  I hadn’t slept in so many weeks, that my body had become accustomed to non-sleep and perpetual anxiety.

By now, going to the hospital was second nature.  It seemed like all the nurses knew me , in and out of the OR, the anesthesiologists looked at me and said, “YOU—again??”  I tried to keep it light.  I walked into the operating room and took one look at the the masked nurses whose eyes remembered me well.  “Put on some soul music, “ I said.  “I want to go to sleep with Luther Vandross.”

Dr. Chen and Dr. Keller were both in the room.  I was shaking under the warm white blanket as they put the mask over my face.  It was the 4^th time I was in surgery since July.  It was October 1, 2004.  All over the city people were participating in the Breast Cancer Walk, to raise money for the American Cancer Society.  Someone told me there were women from my school walking with my name on their shirts.

I was asleep. Unconscious for about 12 hours.     

I had fallen off the face of the earth.

And I did wake up.  I was still alive; I know because I pinched myself.  The room was lined with patients who need intensive care.  There was barely a curtain between us, and the light shown in my eyes from over the curtain, for another 12 hours.  There were not enough nurses on the floor where my room was, to permit more patients to go up.  I was a captive of misery.

In the recovery room, the man next to me was coughing and throwing up. For hours.  His visitors talked loudly and their presence was an intrusion.  At one point someone brought in a child and left her on one side of the room.  She wailed constantly for her mother.  Where was her mother?

Here I am out of a 12 hour surgery, wanting to cry myself and hearing this child wail interminably.  I did what I thought was remarkable under the circumstances: I hadn’t eaten in over a day, I was catheterized, I was tubed hither and yon, I was on a morphine pump, but I opened my mouth and screamed,  “WHERE IS THAT CHILD’S MOTHER? WHO IS WITH HER? WHY IS SHE CRYING???????”  I felt like screaming “TAWANDA”  from the movie Fried Green Tomatoes.  Don’t freaking mess with a woman who has just lost a breast.

The nurses came running. RUNNING to see what was wrong.  I told them to do something about the child– fast.  And for God sake, get the light out of my eyes.

I got good care.  Every few minutes someone was at my side taking my vitals, and poking my new breast with some kind of pin and looking at it with a light.  They were making sure the graft was taking and that blood was flowing.

My husband came in with dinner for the nurses who were short staffed and overworked.

At 9:00 p.m. on Saturday, I was wheeled to my semi-private room.  I had entered the hospital about 6:00 a.m. Friday morning.

Sunday the nurses started to make the rounds.  A lovely, cheerful woman attended to me; she had been on duty for 16 hours.  Straight.  I had hired a private duty nurse for the nights whose presence made me feel secure.  I couldn’t move.  I had no pain.  I was hooked up to a morphine pump.  By the second day I was hallucinating.  Every time I closed my eyes I saw bright red patterns, paisleys, swirls.  I was queasy, unable to eat, couldn’t sit up, couldn’t get to the bathroom myself, let alone go without help.

I had 1 drain the size of a small apple hanging from under my arm and 4 dangling from my lower abdomen.

The second night, there was one nurse for the whole floor.  I don’t know how many patients there were; 20? 30? One nurse.  After an hour, a patient got out of the bed trying to get to the bathroom himself.  He fell and was bleeding.  We could hear the nurse’s voice become hysterical, overwhelmed. The one nurse on duty started to cry.  This did not make me feel secure.

I was told that I would be leaving the hospital that Monday.  After 3 days.  I asked the doctor if I could stay longer, I felt awful.  I was released, in a wheel chair, unable to keep my head up.

One of the doctors who had been in the OR took a look at me being wheeled out, recognized me and asked if I had been hit by a truck.  Cute.

And so, home.  A visiting nurse came daily for 2 weeks.  The drains remained in that long, pulling and tearing at me, rubber bulbs that collected fluid that had to be measured and recorded.  I wore over-sized house dresses and tried to relieve the downward pressure by hoisting them up in slings.  It would take about 2 years to be pain free from the abdominal surgery.  There was never pain in the breast—too many nerves were cut.

On October 8, I took my first shower in days, slowly, carefully. With a special chair supporting me. The phone rang.  It was my son.

He wanted to know where I was and what was wrong.  On AOL accounts there are up to 7 screen names; we all sign into the same place.  He noticed from school that I had 90 unopened emails; unheard of for me.  I got out of the shower, my husband handed me the phone, and I told him I was fine, that I was very weak because I hadn’t eaten in a few days—due to a “bad stomach virus.”

I am miserable but I am still here, and I am on the mend.

When one is alive, one is privileged to feel miserable.

*Intraductal carcinoma in situ