Happy BRA Day

Alternative title to this post: Thank God that's done.

Apparently Wednesday really was BRA Day, as in there is an official 'Breast Reconstruction Awareness' Day. True story - try Googling it. Ummm, no comment.

So... I went up to University Hospital on Wednesday to go to what I knew would be a painfully bad BRA Day event. And as usual, I was right. LOL. (I repeat: WHAT WAS I THINKING?!) After getting out of town late because my daughter came home from school with pinkeye and had to get rushed in to see the doctor because we were heading out of town straight from my event, we spent nearly two hours in traffic. Although I had planned to be fashionably late, it's hard to know where 'fashionably late' for a two-hour event crosses the line into 'don't bother showing up' territory. Fortunately, if I crossed that line, then so did my plastic surgeon and, like, every other person involved in this god-awful event, because when I arrived shortly after 6 PM, there were approximately five other people there. Okay, maybe 10 or 15, but that's counting the people in charge of food and drink and check-in. (Hey, at least there was food and drink!) But I was seriously cursing Dr. T at that point, because he knows I live 1-2 hours away - and definitely closer to two when we are talking about an event that starts at 5:30 - and was thinking it was quite a lot to ask of me if he himself couldn't be bothered enough to show up.

Around 6:30, the plastic surgeons started to trickle in, probably because that's when they were supposed to start giving talks and introducing their patient suckers speakers. I mean, I get that they were all in surgery, blah blah blah, but then, dude, JUST GIVE UP ON THE BRA DAY EVENT!! I mean, it's not like refusing to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr's birthday for gosh sake. Dr. T was scheduled to give a talk at 6:50, for which he was late, which was excused with a He is late because he is busy actually DOING breast reconstruction right now. Which I get, of course. Breast reconstruction takes a long freaking time, which I know, because I went under around 8 in the morning and came to around 9:30 at night, and Dr. T was there, and I remember that he was there, and it meant a lot to me that he was. And if he hadn't been there or had rushed off because he had to go give a talk at some f-ing 'awareness' event, I would have been pissed. Okay so maybe not, I'm not sure I was with it enough to be pissed off, but I did appreciate that he was there when I woke up (so much that I actually gave his wife a thank-you present, but that's a different story). So I get it. And I have no idea of where the idea for doing such an event came from, but I'll venture a guess and say that I doubt it came from anyone who was actually at the event. Gaaaaaaah! It was one of those events where you don't know whether to feel sorry for yourself for being a big enough sucker to be there, or for the organizers of the event, that they couldn't sucker more people into being there.

Anyway, three plastic surgeons gave talks, and each one who gave a talk also had a patient give a talk in conjunction with his/her talk. The surgeons' talks were pretty uninspired, with an air of OMG IT'S 7 PM AND WANT TO GO HOOOOOOME! but the patient testimonials were more interesting. And to be totally fair, I have to say that chatting with a few of the other patients made the 1.5 hours I was there bearable. I've never talked to other breast cancer patients in person before.

At any rate, for what it is worth, here is how I summed up five months of turmoil into a five-minute talk:

I took sort of a backwards path to reconstruction. I pretty much figured everything out on my own, then bullied Dr. T into doing what I wanted (or so he says). My story goes something like this: I initially had a lumpectomy, but one of the margins was very close, so my surgeon wanted to do a re-excision. But she was so confident the re-excision would take care of things that we scheduled it around both her upcoming vacation and my upcoming vacation, with the plan being re-excision, vacation, then radiation. We didn’t even talk about other possibilities. So needless to say, I was pretty shocked when I found out I had three positive margins after the re-excision. Naturally I freaked out, and my surgeon was on vacation, and I was leaving in three days.

In a panic, I met with both my radiation oncologist and my medical oncologist, both of whom counseled me to have a mastectomy. But I didn’t want to believe it, so I decided to keep shopping for opinions until I found a doctor who would tell me what I wanted to hear. So I called UH and set up a consultation for as soon as I got back from vacation. Then I left town for two weeks.

Of course, a few days into my vacation, my surgeon called me and said she agreed with all of my other doctors; I needed a mastectomy. So I spent the first week of vacation crying and feeling sorry for myself. Once I got the self-pity out of my system, I started consulting with Dr. Google about my options. I knew nothing when I started, as a mastectomy wasn’t even on my radar originally.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that I didn’t want an implant. So many people have asked me about this, and I have to admit I don’t have a good reason for this other than I just don’t (and you can’t make me). So that left me with flap reconstruction or no reconstruction. And since I was making this decision on the beach, surrounded by women in bikinis, it wasn’t an environment conducive to deciding against reconstruction. So I spent the second week of vacation eating a lot of fattening foods, drinking a lot of beer, and researching places in the U.S. that did DIEP reconstruction on women my size.

When I got back, I came up to UH for a consultation with Dr. F, and of course she recommended a mastectomy, which I had accepted by then. Dr. F said I would feel better if I met with a plastic surgeon, and called over to plastic surgery. As luck would have it, Dr. T was able to come over within an hour. I was a little nervous about meeting a plastic surgeon, but he wasn’t at all creepy like I was expecting. And even more important than not being creepy, when he asked me why I didn’t want an implant, and I told him I just don’t (and you can’t make me), that was okay with him. So then he said, ‘So tell me what you want.’

I told him I wanted to do a mastectomy with flap reconstruction, then waited for him to tell me that he couldn’t. But he didn’t. But he did stare at me for a long time, and pinch all my fat. Then he told me it wouldn’t be easy, but that he could figure out a way to do it. It would be a process, and I had to give him an entire year before I would be allowed to get mad at him. I’m sure that answer wouldn’t work for most people, but for me, it was exactly what I wanted to hear. It reminded me of when I was buying ski boots last year. The saleswoman told me it was like shopping for a wedding dress; you know when you’ve found the right ones, and you don’t need to keep looking. I think it’s the same with breast reconstruction. Regardless of what decision you make, you’ll know when things are right.

And I’ll be honest – it wasn’t easy. There were a lot of bumps in the road between the time we met in July and when I finally had the reconstruction done in September, but the important thing is that I got what I wanted in the end. It has been six weeks now, and I feel great. I just hope Dr. T isn’t too traumatized from having to put up with me, but one thing I’ve learned about myself in the past few months is that I’m willing to be annoying to get my way when it’s something this big. So for me, the end justifies the means, because the end is something I have to live with for the rest of my life, and I hope that’s a long time.

I think it went... fine. I mean, whatever. This is coming from a person who lectures to a room full of apathetic students on a daily basis, so it wasn't much worse than that. LOL. And the parts of the talk that were supposed to be funny were interpreted as funny, like the part about Dr. T not being creepy, and the part where I'm a bully. Dr. T actually started off his talk with Waning is right; she DID bully me into doing what she wanted. But like all the women in my life, she was right.

Yeah, so there.

After my talk, I did have a decent conversation with Dr. T, as well as with another patient of his he suckered into attending. She was actually a super sweet woman, who got an implant eight years ago, which then got infected. Like me, she only met Dr. T through chance; she went into the ER for her infection, and he happened to be on call. So she ended up ditching the implant and doing DIEP reconstruction on July 23rd. She kept hugging me and crying and telling me how inspirational I was for being brave enough to talk about my experience just six weeks after surgery, which was super sweet, but since I'm totally not emotional like that, it freaked me out. She actually asked me at one point, 'Don't you ever get emotional about all of this?' and while I tried to figure out how to explain my 40-year-long history of not being emotional in a few sentences, I decided it was easier just to say, 'No. Not really.' Meanwhile, she kept hugging Dr. T, too, which freaked me out more because I was thinking to myself, Am I supposed to be hugging Dr. T? Is that what normal patients do? Does he think I'm not emotional about any of this because I haven't hugged him? I didn't know you were supposed to/allowed to hug doctors. I think Dr. L was the first doctor I've ever hugged, and I feel like she's the one who started it. In fact, I'm sure she did. I do not hug people unless I'm attacked first.

So overall, it was... okay... I guess. But man was I happy when, around 7:15, my husband texted me to tell me that he and the kids were ready to pick me up whenever I was done. I figured I had stayed long enough that I could excuse myself gracefully. When I told Dr. T and his surgeon friends that my ride was there, Dr. T told me that he would walk me out, which was nice, but also kind of sucked, because I was getting ready to get into the car and drive a few hours, and I kind of needed to pee. But going to the bathroom while your surgeon is walking you out of the building just isn't cool, so... I didn't. On the way out, Dr. T semi apologized for the event - lack of participation and blah blah blah - and thanked me for coming such a long way for it. I didn't know exactly what to say, so I just said, 'Well, I wouldn't do it for just anyone.' Which is true - I do feel that Dr. T and I have a very special relationship that I'm unlikely to ever have with any other doctor, ever. (And it's not because he is hot, dudes. I seriously spent the whole evening trying to see him as hot, and he totally is not, no matter what those of you who know who he is say.) I'm honestly not sure what the connection is, but it is there, and it's a good thing. I think part of it is because I'm an academic, and the academic part of Dr. T's job seems really important to him, so in those regards, he sees me more like a peer than a patient. He told me that he was really looking forward to his talk at my school in April, and that he was planning to spend the whole day in my town. He said he had arranged to meet with other doctors in my town on that same day to talk about some of the things they do at UH that can't be done in my town, one of which is Dr. L, but other than that, he would love to come meet with students or do... whatever.

I mean, this is not normal. I love this guy! The cynic in me is like, What am I missing here?! but then I realize I have the hard part of surgery behind me, so there's no ulterior motive in all of this. It's just... dumb luck, I guess. A religious person would chalk it up to 'all things happen for a reason,' but since I don't believe in that, I guess I'll just keep sallying forth, and being thankful the event is over. :)