Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy by Geralyn Lucas

Author:Geralyn Lucas [Lucas, Geralyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Breast Cancer, Nonfiction, Personal Memoir, Retail
ISBN: 9780312334468
Google: 4h0rAwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 031233446X
Barnesnoble: 031233446X
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2005-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

11

18-Hour Support Bra

The first thing I think when I wake up after my implant surgery is that I have a newfound respect for strippers. This hurts soooo much.

After four blow-ups in my plastic surgeon’s office, I have reached the final phase of my reconstruction, which involves a surgery to replace the reconstruction expander implant with a real saline implant. I have also decided to get an “enhancement” implant on the left side to match the new bigger fake boob on the right. During my intake at the hospital, the nurse seems to be very rude to me.

“Have you had any other surgery?” she asks.

“I had a mastectomy in August.”

Her face drops and she actually says she is sorry and I realize she thought that I was just another one of those silly plastic surgery junkies checking in to have a boob job. Well, sort of.

They send me home with drains stitched inside of me again and I empty my drains all night. I am pretty used to what the wound fluid should look like after wearing the milk-carton drains so often after surgery, but this time it looks like pure blood. Tyler comes home from his hospital shift at midnight, and when I show him the blood he mumbles that I should probably go to the emergency room and then passes out from exhaustion.

When I call Dr. P the next morning she is panicked and I am rushed into emergency surgery because I am bleeding where my new implant is. I am too scared of the drama to feel angry at Tyler for blowing me off last night. He has been so sleep-deprived from his surgery residency and taking care of me during the night shifts at home. It is so hard for him to be on-call for me, too.

On the way into the operating room I am thinking how crazy it would be if my breast implant killed me and not the breast cancer. Am I vain to be going through this?

After the surgery they check me into Tyler’s orthopedic floor in the hospital. He’s on call so if I’m on his floor he can see me tonight. Tonight, I just want to be one of his patients, not his wife. I want my bandage to be on my knee and not my boob so that he can change my bandage and reassure me. I want him to care about my cancer the way he cares about his patients. One of his bosses comes to my hospital room and hands Tyler a textbook and a video and tells him that he is doing a hip revision surgery tomorrow . . . another patient is pulling him away.

But even after all that expanding my skin is still not sloping naturally enough and it is pushing the reconstruction implant too high up on my right side. So like all construction projects, we are over time and over budget. I need another surgery to move the implant lower down. Dr. P is

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