Thursday, April 22nd - Scar Revision Surgery

It all started when I went for my first post-op visit to my Plastic Surgeon yesterday at 3:00. As he looked at my wounds, the look on his face was ominous. He told me the purple-ish skin around my incisions meant they were not getting enough blood supply for healing, and he needed to go in and remove the dead tissue. This type of complication happens 10% of the time, and not just to diabetics. He said it was not necessarily my diabetes that caused this.

Here's a little blurb I found that explains it:

Delayed wound healing may result because blood vessels are cut during mastectomy. This can occasionally present problems when the body tries to heal the incision site. If blood flow to the incision site is insufficient, small areas of skin may wither or scab, requiring that your surgeon trim them. This is neither a serious nor a common complication.

So they put me under general anesthesia again, last night, 8pm. Same ordeal... not eating for many hours, pre-op prep, IV insertion, intubating, waking up, sore throat, trying to breathe, leg squeezers, headache. Surgery went well.

But I had a really really bad night. They gave me pain medicine (dilaudid) by IV before going home from the hospital around 11pm, but we forgot to take it again just before going to sleep. I woke up at 4:30am in excruciating pain, just my right breast. The pain was so horrendous, I so wanted to die. So at 4:53, Paul gave me a pill, but I said I didn't think I could survive the 30+ minutes it would take to kick in. As I watched the digital clock tick each min., praying for acceIeration, told Paul to tell the kids I loved them and I'm sorry they had to lose their mother. I tried every mental trick I could, to relax into the pain, but nothing worked, and the pain just caused me to cry and become more tense which increased the pain. Paul was so close to calling 911 to take me to the hospital; but I begged him not to, and tried to keep quiet after that. It was surreal. I could relate with the soldier wounded on a battlefield wishing someone would shoot him dead to relieve him of his misery.

Looking back, perhaps staying overnight last night in the hospital would've been better than coming home, so they could've monitored my pain. But I chose to come home. Who knew.

This morning at my gen'l surgeon appt, he explained that during the initial surgery when he was cutting away the tumors, he may have been a little too agressive in trying to get clean margins, and cut too close to the skin, not leaving enough connecting blood vessels near the skin to enable healing. He said sometimes it's hard to tell where the line is between tissue and vessels. His philosophy is that it's better to be more agressive and take more tissue than less to be sure to get all the cancer cells. IOW, better safe than sorry. And of course I agree. But that leaves less skin to work with.

Also during this 2nd surgery, my PS extracted some saline from the expanders, deflating them somewhat, in order for the skin to have more room to heal. He will inflate them to normal at a later date after I'm healed.

Thems the breaks, I guess. Sh*t happens. I can't wait till this is behind me. I'm staying strong though, and oh boy, do I appreciate pain free moments. They are WONDERFUL! Life is good!