My Day of Surgery Is Finally Here
This is the day I have been trying to get to for 7 months!
Preparations
The night before you have to take a shower with Dial Antibacterial Soap, not eat anything after 12 and sleep on clean sheets. The next morning you have to take another shower with the Dial soap...and then you are ready.
Pre-Op Procedures
Pre-op was PAINFUL! The first nurse had a hard time finding a vein for the IV. Painful! She couldn't figure it out and decided to wait until I came back from the Women's Unit.
Before the lumpectomy they wheeled me half-way across the hospital (in a wheel chair - in a hospital gown) to the Women's Unit to:
1. Have them do a "Sentinel Node Mapping" by putting 4 needles in my nipple of dye that would travel to the 2-3 lymph nodes the surgeon needed to remove in order to check to make sure the cancer had not spread beyond the breast.
It was PAINFUL!
2. Have them do a "ultrasound-guided wire localization" by putting 2 wires (metal looking wires) in my breast tissue to put a frame around the mass that the surgeon had to remove.
The nipple needles were painful but the wires were TORTURE! They were using an ultrasound to figure out where to put the needles and couldn't quite see where it should go so it was a lot of back and forth. The doctor doing it kept apologizing. He was a nice man doing a painful procedure.
It was helpful that I knew the ladies from the Women's Unit. They were the same ones who did my mammogram, ultrasound and biopsy back in May. I was happy too see them and again they had done this hundreds of times so knew it was painful. One of them
gave me her hand to squeeze to blunt the pain for those two procedures (
as she does this and I'm squeezing her hand I think about creating something to sell to the hospitals like a stress ball) ...then they tell me...