I thought I had chosen what to do. I knew I would change my mind a dozen times but now I’m angry. I’m angry because I was naive. I was naive to just think they could suck fat from my tummy and reverse vacuum it into my boob (or the skin envelope of what’s left of my boob).
No such luck.
Not.even.close.
Turns out it’s like an actual transplant. One where veins and arteries are found in my stomach tissue, mapped, taken out and reattached to veins and arteries in my chest.
The surgery takes 8-10 hours. They cut a triangle out of one half of your abdomen, below your belly button. They move your belly button but keep it attached (this is when I threw up in my mouth). They detach the fat and some layers of abdominal tissue with veins/arteries attached. They place it in your breast skin envelope. Sew everything up.
They wheel you into ICU for 12 hours to make sure the clot doesn’t develop (it’s less than a 10% chance). If happens, there’s only a 50% chance that the transplant can be saved. If you don’t develop a clot, you go to recovery and stay over another night. Maybe another night after that.
It’s like having a tummy tuck and a boob job at the same time. Recovery is being attracted to two drains and while you are allowed to be up and around, you won’t be back to normal for months.
It’s ten hours of surgery to make something that doesn’t even work. At the end of ten excruciating hours, I still won’t have a breast that DOES ANYTHING. It just looks better than having nothing. It’s symmetrical.
That was my last choice. This was what I thought an easy choice was. No foreign objects, which still grosses me out.
So then we asked more questions - actually my husband was more on top of this than I was. By now I was so grossed out. Y relocating belly buttons, losing nipples and drains that I couldn’t fathom anything but throwing my hands up-screaming-and waking out.
Long story short (and mostly because all the details of this meeting are garbled up with raw emotions of pure disgust and I’m having trouble remembering the order of everything): there are options that sets up in stages so that at each stage, I still have the most options. First, mastectomy. This involves general anesthesia and an overnight stay. A drain.
One to three weeks later, I can do an outpatient procedure to insert an expander, which sits in place to keep the skin from retracting. Every few weeks the expander is filled a bit more with saline so it expands to the preferred size. If I chose, I can have the left boob lifted and reduced at the same time. It’s still an outpatient procedure.
Three to four months later, they can either put in an implant or do the tissue transplant.
So my options are still all open. I can test drive the expander and if that doesn’t bother me, it’s likely that an implant won’t either. Apparently an implant is more comfortable than the expander.
The schedule coordinator in the office handed me a sheet of paper with a date and time of a support group. It’s somewhere I can meet people who gave made these different decisions and can feel free to ask what it was really like. I guess that’s where I go next.
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