Reconstruction surgery was a success!!!

Patty at 5:30 this morning wearing the latest in hospital fashion!

7:31 p.m. – I just walked in the house after a long day at the hospital!  I figured the first thing I needed to do when I got home was let everyone know how today went.

Well… we got up at 4 a.m.   No… change that!  I got up at 4 a.m. and Patty rolled out of bed around 4:25.  OK… that’s more accurate!  We were out the door about 4:50 a.m. and at  the hospital around 5:20.  Patty checked-in and they took us back into the prep room shortly thereafter.  The last few of days I could see Patty was experiencing some anxiety over the surgery.  As I think I said in yesterdays post… “I don’t blame her”.  This is pretty major surgery!  Last night she was getting a little weepy over not being able to care for Avery for the next 8 weeks as well as being pretty limited with what she’ll be able to physically do.  Bottom line, she was just frightened.  But this morning, she was completely different.  She was a little tentative, but she was ready to take this next step head on!  She had a great attitude and was laughing and smiling.

The staff at Scripps Green was amazing and really kept Patty at ease.  We met with the surgery nurse and the anesthesiologist around 6:30 and were pretty much ready to go for the 7:00 a.m. surgery.  The only person missing was the reconstruction surgeon!  Waiting is always hard in these circumstances.  You know how that goes… you’re there and just want to get this over-with!  7 a.m. rolled around and no surgeon… 7:20… no surgeon.  Now I think the waiting was getting to Patty as she told me that she was starting to get a little scared.  7:30… no surgeon.  Finally around 7:40 a.m. the surgeon waltzed in.  Thank God!  I could see the tension leave Patty’s body when she walked in.  The surgeon marked Patty up with a purple marker to indicate to her where she’d be making the incisions for the procedure.  She spoke with us for a few minutes and said she was ready to go and she’d find me in the waiting room when she was done.  She said the procedure will take around 4 1/2 to 6 hours.  Phew… I knew it’d be a long morning.  She left and within a minute another nurse came in and walked off with Patty.

I went over to the cafeteria and got breakfast.  I looked at my watch and saw it was only 8 a.m.  I thought “Oh man… Patty won’t be out until probably 1 or 2 o’clock.  So I had breakfast, read the paper, read a few chapters in a book I’m reading, watched people come in and out of the waiting room (by the way, waiting rooms are a great place to people watch!) and watched a little TV.  I noticed it was around noon and I was now reading some pamphlet on hospital services (as I’ve now read everything else) when the surgeon came in.  I glanced up and was surprised to see her.  I said: “Are you already done?”  She replied that she was and continued by saying that everything went great!  She had a big smile on her face and said it was a perfect surgery… no issues, no problems, no nothing!  Everything went as planned.  In fact she said: “I think this is one of the best one’s I’ve ever done!”  She said Patty did great and was awake in the recovery room!  Wow!  Not even four hours!  That was awesome!  I wasn’t able to see Patty in the recovery room, but that was ok.  I met up with her once she was transferred to her room about an hour later.

I have to say, Patty looks great!  So far she’s experiencing little pain.  She not drugged up other than taking a Vicodin every few hours.  She is doing so well!  I’m so proud of her!  She’s a stud!  Hopefully she’ll be doing just as well, or better, tomorrow.

Patty has to stay in the hospital until at least Monday.  Quite honestly, she’s was ready to come home tonight!  But, we have to do what the doctor tells her to do.

I could tell Patty was feeling pretty good this evening when she asked: “Are you going to make a dump run this weekend?”

She had the surgery!

Look at that girl!  The love of my life!  Who would ever think that something like cancer would have attacked her.  Like I said in an earlier post… breast cancer can pick anyone as their victim!

OK… so, the surgery was scheduled and we counted down the days until it would happen!  I just kept thinking… “She’s being treated for cure!!!”  That sounded so much better than the earlier prognosis!  Patty had a few meltdown’s on the days before the surgery… she’s still terrified and she’s also doing the “what if’s?”  “What if…. it spread?  What if… they find it’s in the lymph nodes?”  Hey, I don’t blam her for thinking about those things.  (OK… I’ll admit, those “what if’s” crossed my minds also!) 

So the day finally came… Thursday, July 29th!  The day the cancer comes out and the cure begins!  Patty slept really well the night before!  I was surprised but she really did.  I was the one who woke up at midnight thinking it was time to get up.  I also woke up at 4 a.m. and layed there in the dark and couldn’t get back to sleep.  So I got up at 4:30 a.m. and started my day.  Patty actually got up around 7 a.m.  We had to be at the hospital at 9 a.m. and surgery was scheduled for 12:30 p.m.

We got to the hospital a little before 9:00 a.m.  They took us into a “pre-op” room shortly thereafter.  The room was really small, but the setup is great.  It’s just a room to hang out in before surgery.  They wanted Patty there early so they could inject some type of radioactive dye into her breast that would allow the surgeon to see exactly where the cancer was located and be assured she got it all out!  (that’s pretty important!)  Patty had the injection around 10 a.m. which took maybe 20 minutes.  She came back in the pre-op room and we just hung out waiting for surgery time.  Nicole (Patty’s daughter) showed up around 10:30 a.m. and helped me kill time and keep Patty busy until surgery time.  I could feel the anxiety in the room watching the clock tick, tick, tick to 12:30.  I know Nicole felt it also but she was a trooper and wanted to keep her mother’s mind off of things so she (who is 7 months pregnant) told us stories about her birthing class and how she was worried about her maternal instincts kicking in!  She had us laughing about  how her gag reflex would most likely kick in when her baby has “ugly/stinky poo!”  Well, it turned out that the surgeon was at another clinic that morning and was running late!  The scheduled 12:30 surgery was more like 1:15!  But we patiently waited.  She showed up a little after 1:00 p.m.  She was just her happy self as usual!  She was just what Patty needed to see.  I could see her anxiety level drop the second the doctor walked in.  So, it was time to go… I gave Patty a kiss and she walked off with the doctor.  Before she left, the surgeon told me that her part of the procedure would take an hour to and hour and a half to complete then the reconstruction surgeon would come in and that would take another hour and a half.  She said she’d meet me in the waiting room.  So I walked over to the waiting area and did what I was supposed to do… wait!  Damn, that seems like all we’ve done is wait.  But what’s another three hours after the last three months?  My sister, her husband and son came to wait with me, so I wasn’t alone.  But when talking to them, my mind was in the surgery room wondering how things were going.  An hour past… no doctor.  An hour and a half passed… still no doctor.  Ok, so my mind was starting to play games with me… a little.  Of course I was making excused in my head why the surgeon wasn’t out yet.  Now two hours had passed… no doctor.  Ok, I’m really starting to freak out.  I’m normally not like that… but this was my wife, my best friend in the surgery room having a mastectomy!  I wasn’t feeling good about this.  I tried having a “normal” conversation with my sister, but looking back right now… I have no idea what I talked to them about.  About two and a half hours into the surgery, the surgeon came walking down the hallway.  She looked at me and apologized for the time but she said she was stuck waiting for the biopsy results.  She said the surgery went great… they did find one lymph node that had, as she said, “a little cancer” in it.  But the one next to it tested negative.   She also said they biopsied 14 other lymph nodes and wouldn’t have the results for at least another 5 days or so.  Whatever the results of the biopsy are just tell them what treatment Patty will need.  She did say she wouldn’t be surprised if Patty will have to go through chemo or radiation or both.  It was kind of a stupid question I asked, but I asked:  “Will Patty be alright?”  She smiled at me and said: “Patty will be fine.”

“Treating for cure” means more doctor appointments!

Things have been moving so fast since the doctors are now “Treating for Cure!”  We met with two more incredible doctors over the past two weeks!  First was with the surgeon who will remove the cancer. 

Patty and I had an appointment with the surgeon on Wednesday, July 21st.  She is the kind of woman that you just feel comfortable with the moment you meet her.  She’s probably around her 40’s but has a bio that’s a mile long.  She has a great bedside manner and had Patty laughing harder than I’ve seen her laugh since this whole nightmare started!  She explained that she could “try” to do a lumpectomy but felt a mastectomy would be best to minimize reoccurrence.  Patty agreed with her suggestion.  She also suggested that we start the breast reconstruction at the same time as the surgery.  The doctor explained that once she removed the breast she would biopsy some of the lymph nodes in her breast which would determine what type of post operative treatment she would need… chemo… radiation… hormone therapy or a combination of treatments.  She said they’ll biopsy two or three lymph nodes and if they come back positive for cancer they’ll keep biopsying them until they find some that are clear.  Once they find the clear ones, they stop.  Hey, she’s the doctor.  At the end of the appointment, she said if everything works out, she could have the surgery by the end of the following week!  She obviously knew the urgency of this situation we were in, which the doctors at the other hospital failed to see!    (Hmmm.. do I sound bitter?)  It was close to noon and she said: “let me see if I can get a hold of the the reconstruction surgeon and see if he can see you.”  She left the room and came back a couple minutes later saying: “he’s just eating his lunch and I told him to put his lunch down and see you.  So he’s waiting for you right now!”  We thanked her and went downstairs to the reconstruction doctors office.  There he was, standing outside in the reception area waiting for us.  He took us in and conducted an exam with Patty.  He then sat us down and explained how the reconstruction procedure would work.  He was very thorough and made us feel very comfortable.  He then introduced us to his office manager who put things in motion for the surgery.  She coordinated both doctors schedules and whamo… a surgery date of July 29th!  We actually had a surgery date!  You don’t know how much we’ve wanted this date!