Totally worth the effort. He called in not only his nurse, but someone he was training (for what, I don't know; she certainly didn't know much about breast cancer/treatment/reconstruction.) AND he asked for photos. (Then all the girls in the office wanted to see it and where did I get it and their son is getting married and ooo it's so light and silky and how come THEY didn't find anything at Nordstrom's as nice as that?)
Then I disrobed and gave him my own inexpert opinion about why the scar on the right is dark and brown and wide while the scars on the left are thin and pink: since the temporary expansion that was done on the right was done sort of beyond what he knew he wanted (on purpose) not only did it stretch the skin gradually, but it also stretched the scar as it was healing. And (she takes a bow) I was right. As a matter of fact, he was kind of sorry that I hadn't left it to the trainee to try to explain :) Which she couldn't have done anyway. Hah.
I swear I am not becoming (or have I ever been, Sen. McCarthy) a plastic surgery addict. HOWEVER, I will never want the aureola etc tattoo as long as the only thing that draws my eye is this brown line across what I'm supposed to make myself believe is a breast.
I have always known that the "soft tissue deficit" pockets which are actually kind of hollow places created by the original mastectomy, still exist to a certain extent. But after the liposuction that gave him what he used to "transplant" fat was so very uncomfortable, to say the least, I had figured the hollows were here to stay, and I'd just have to live with them. I knew a lot of that fat had, technically, died (hadn't latched on to a blood supply) and hadn't done its hollow-filling job very well. Today, after he said that scar revision was absolutely on the menu for a next step, he said I could store "coins for the toll booths" in those little pockets of nothing. And then he convinced me to go through another (much smaller-scale) fat transplant procedure to try to correct this some more. He showed me where he would take it from, and call me gullible, but I trust the man. And I'm not-so-secretly relieved that he feels the hollows should go, if at all possible.
I'll tell you what else he wants to do, that I figured I'd just have to live with - the right mound (that's what we in the biz call reconstruction sites) sits a bit lower than the left one. You'd never notice that, but I sure do. It has something to do with the fact that the left implant has support from all that extra muscle from my back, and the right implant is just "regular" - so supported by one muscle and some skin. (The downside of the left-hand radiation that caused the whole thing to go bad right from the get-go turned into the upside that the "back flap surgery" creates a better outcome.) So, the left sits higher, and the right has, as he said, "settled."
He says that while he is doing the scar revision, it's time to lift the right a bit to match the left. Now, who wouldn't want that? I do! I do!
He's off to Europe for a few weeks, and knowing him it could either be for a fab vacay or it could be to do free surgeries on children who need it - he does both. He says we should try for after we get back from Cape Cod, and he's got the one employee who has been there since this whole odyssey started - his office manager Marie, to check on the insurance stuff.
(Marie, by the way, showed me her mother-of-the-bride dress that she just picked up today, and it is beautiful too. After the wedding she's going to use it for her ballroom dancing competitions. Marie is very cool and strong enough to survive working for Dr. D. all this time, AND she always says "don't worry about the money" and then she's right, so she is my hero in more ways than one.)
So, this thing was on Facebook today, and I love it, and I hope I can do it, EVERY DAY.
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