The oncology appointment before my last chemo session was different from all the others. We discussed things we never had before, like my hair growth and my period. Talking about my hair coming back felt like a new beginning.
“You should have about half an inch to one inch of hair in about three months,” Doctor 7 said. “So it will probably be that long before you feel comfortable going out in public without a hat.”
“Charley is going to be thrilled,” I said to Erin. “I promised her I’d have enough hair to put in a barrette by her birthday in March. By those calculations I should be right on target,” I said with a grin. I turned my attention back to Doctor 7. “I haven’t had my period since my first treatment and I’m having hot flashes. I know that’s one of the potential side effects, I just don’t know for how long.”
“That happens. I’m afraid you might never have your period again.”
I could tell Doctor 7 thought I’d be upset, but I honestly thought that was kind of a gift, although the hot flashes were driving me crazy.
“About 40 percent of women stay in menopause, but that depends how far they are from entering it in the first place. In any case, it will be at least a year or two before you get your period back, if that happens at all.”
“And what about monitoring for recurrences of cancer?”
“We’ll see you quite frequently—you’ll come back for checkups in three months, six months, nine months, and so on.”
“And you’ll do blood work?”
“No. We’ll look for any symptoms and do a physical exam.”
That caught me off guard. I thought they’d monitor my blood work. “What about mammograms or MRIs?”
“Not unless you have symptoms again—aches or pains that aren’t explainable.”
I couldn’t quite believe that that was all that would be done, but what could I say? I thanked her and we left for the chemo suite.
“Cupcakes!” Everyone in the suite gathered around, oohing and aahing at Erin’s baking skills.
I started to tear up. The chemo treatments sucked, but I’d enjoyed the presence of so many of my close friends and family along for the journey—having their company, but also discovering what they thought about the whole experience.
Greg was probably the one who was the most fascinated by the medical stuff. My mom was probably the most emotional, because I was her daughter, after all. I knew she would have traded places with me in a heartbeat if she could have. Melanie definitely brought the best snacks, and she made me laugh—oh, how she made me laugh! Nina was so kind, and because of her uncle, she knew exactly what to expect and what to say. Mary Kay was curious but also genuinely concerned, wanting to know everything she could to help. My brother-in-law, Doug, was great to have along because that gave us a chance to spend more time together than we ever had before and to get to know each other. And Erin: her big-breasted cupcakes and balloons probably made me more emotional than I had ever been on the entire journey so far.
Thinking about Erin made me think about Braden and his family. I think my having cancer was harder on Braden than I’d initially thought, simply because he was so far away. If he had been here, I knew he would have dropped everything to help me, no questions asked.
I lay back on the stretcher. My last infusion was going off without a hitch so far—no reaction or nausea, although I was exhausted. “Even though I know I’ll be hurting again in a few days, this time it’ll be different,” I said to Erin. “When the aches and pains are gone, that’s it.” Next thing I knew, I felt something tapping me on my shoulder. It was the nurse. I had fallen asleep. The infusion was done. I was finished with chemotherapy.
“It seems surreal,” I said to Erin.
We had the nurse take a picture of me with Erin’s balloons and the I Did It! sign, as well as the few cupcakes that were left. I looked around for a minute. I was done with this room. I wouldn’t see these people, these nurses anymore. Although I’d grown to love the chemo nurses, it was great knowing that I was leaving. Surgery was next in line. Then all I could do to help prevent a recurrence was exercise, eat well, take my vitamins and supplements, and enjoy life.
I couldn’t help but feel a little shocked at that.
Part Five
TURNING THE CORNER
Chapter 30
THE NEW, BOOBLESS ME
They want to move Grandma into a nursing home,” my mom said. “She’s not ready for that.” Grandma had been in the hospital for about two weeks. Mom was devastated, and I was floored. I wasn’t trying to be selfish, but I couldn’t help but feel that everything in my life was one step forward, ten steps back. Why couldn’t I catch a break? Why couldn’t Grandma?
The nursing home wasn’t far from where Grandma lived, but it wouldn’t be the same as being at home. The nurses wouldn’t have the same compassion as my mom or anyone else, because she wasn’t their grandmother or their mother.
I took a deep breath. I tried to focus on the bright side. That wasn’t always easy, but it was all I had. Twenty-nine days until new boobs, I thought. What can I do to get myself ready? There wasn’t much, I realized, but what there was to do, I did. I tried to get my body into the best shape possible so it could physically endure another surgery. I drank smoothies, got lots of rest, and took the kids for a walk every day. About two weeks after chemo ended, I had another unwelcome surprise: My period was back. It had been nice not having it for four months. On the bright side of things, though—Always look on the bright side! I thought, somewhat bitterly—the hot flashes subsided. I renewed my supply of tampons.
Although most people would probably be nervous about getting their breasts cut off, I wasn’t. For me, it was the easiest choice of all. And since my last surgery—to remove the cancerous lump—had been only five months earlier, I wasn’t even apprehensive about being operated on the way I had been then. I wasn’t concerned about the pain I’d feel afterwards, either. The idea of beginning this next leg of the journey was welcome—the coming pain was simply part of that.
I wasn’t even sad about the fact that my own breasts—the ones that had fed my babies, the ones that were a part of me—would be gone. I had chosen to have a double mastectomy, and I decided I’d be excited about this, not sad. And since having them removed would give me a better survival rate, I was even glad to see them go. They had betrayed me, and I didn’t want them to be a part of me anymore. I wasn’t thinking that I was losing my breasts, but rather that I was ditching the ones that had turned on me. They were just skin; I would still have my life. And instead I would get a perky new set that most women would pay thousands of dollars for. It was a win-win situation, wasn’t it?
When my alarm went off, I knew something was wrong.
“Greg, wake up.” Everything sounded muffled.
“What is it?” he mumbled.
I went to the window and drew back the curtains. “There are huge drifts of snow everywhere.”
He rolled out of bed. “Good thing we planned to leave early.”
The surgery wasn’t until nine A.M. I had to check in two hours before, and the drive from door to door under perfect conditions was an hour, so we wanted to leave at five-fifteen. We hadn’t accounted for weather like this, though. “I’m glad Mom came over last night, or she would have gotten stuck in this. And I’ve already packed my bags.” In my mind I was running through everything that needed to be done and I turned on the radio as we hurriedly dressed. Weather reports were warning that one of the worst snowstorms of the year was rocking our region. We raced out to the kitchen, and Mom came in as we ran around, Greg grabbing a bite and me making sure everything was set for the kids while I’d be away.
“Do you have everything, Alana?” she asked sleepily.
“I’m good, Mom. Thanks. The kids’ snowsuits are in the front closet, okay?”
“Why are you in such a rush?”
“The weather is terrible, Mom. We have to go.” And with that, we dashed out.
We were on the
roads before any plows, salt trucks or other cars, and were essentially clearing a path for everyone else. We both had never seen anything like it before. The major highways were covered with at least six inches of snow, and the visibility was so minimal we weren’t sure where the road began or ended. Eventually, more people joined us, but many of them passed us and ended up swerving out of control. We saw at least eight cars in the ditches and had to stop for a full twenty minutes for one accident. My knuckles were white, and I wasn’t even driving. I kept saying to myself over and over again, “Please, just get me there.” I didn’t want to miss the surgery.
At almost seven A.M., exactly when we should have been checking in, we were twenty minutes away. I called the hospital. “I’m on my way,” I said. “Don’t start without me.”
Greg began laughing, and I joined in. We were both so nervous. I couldn’t believe I’d said that.
Finally we arrived. Greg pulled up to the main entrance to let me out, and I had the door open almost before he stopped. I ran in to register while he parked. My heart was pounding from the race to the admissions office, but I had made it. I was ushered in to the prep room. This time I knew the routine—gown, bootees, IV, shot of heparin. It was like an assembly line—there were eight operating rooms and eight patients being prepped at the same time—and it was all ticking along like clockwork despite the blizzard. By the time I was done, Greg appeared. Five minutes before my surgery I was escorted from the prep area to the operating room.
“Call Mom, please, to let her know we made it and that I’m on my way in.”
“I will. Are you ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be. See you in a bit,” I said, and headed off to the operating room. I was definitely not as scared as the first time. In fact, I felt like a bit of a pro as I walked in, excited, confident, as if there was a big weight about to be removed from my shoulders—in this case, though, the weight was literal. After I sat down on the operating table, the head nurse introduced me to the other nurses, then asked me to describe in my own words the procedure that was being done. “That way we’re sure we’re all on the same page,” she said.
“I’m having a bilateral mastectomy with expanders put in, and all of the lymph nodes under my left armpit removed.”
“Perfect. Can you lie down, please.”
I did, my arms were strapped to the table, and the anesthesiologist began the gas.
“Please count backwards.”
“Five, four, three, two . . .”
I woke up in the recovery room at 11:20 A.M. I looked for Greg, but couldn’t see him anywhere. I felt a lot of pressure on my chest.
A nurse noticed I was awake. “How are you doing?” she asked.
“Groggy. Much groggier than after my last surgery.”
“Have some water. It’ll make you feel better.”
I did, then fell back asleep again. I woke up when I felt myself being moved. I was on a stretcher being rolled through the hallways, into an elevator, down a hall, and into a private room. I was groggy and the pain was beginning to creep up on me, especially since I was being moved. I asked the orderly the time. It was 12:30. Greg showed up a short time later, around 12:45.
“How are you?” He kissed me.
“I need some painkillers,” I croaked. The pain was starting to come on hard and fast. The effects of the anesthetic had lasted what seemed a long time, but were wearing off by then. “I feel as though there are elephants sitting on my chest, and they keep getting heavier and heavier.”
“I’ll get a nurse.”
I tried not to think of the pain while Greg was gone. I tried not to think of anything. Fifteen minutes later, which seemed like an eternity, the nurse arrived with morphine. Thankfully it came in an IV bag—that meant it could be added into my IV, which was already in place and wouldn’t take too long to kick in. I was desperate. I watched her hook up the bag and attach the tube to my IV line. I couldn’t wait for the morphine to start dripping into me, for the awful feeling to fade away.
“We were wondering if I would be able to stay?” Greg asked the nurse.
“We don’t usually let people stay overnight.”
“Since the weather is so bad, and the roads are terrible, we were hoping you might make an exception.”
I crossed my fingers. I didn’t want to be left alone, and I knew I’d need help, someone to fetch me medicine and help me go to the washroom. I felt overwhelmed and emotionally stunned. I didn’t want to talk, partly because I was groggy, but more because I had just had two body parts removed. I was afraid to touch myself, afraid to see what I looked like, yet relieved at the same time that I no longer needed to worry. After just a bit of convincing, she gave in. She even brought Greg a cot to sleep on.
Once I started moving about, I realized just how limited my movement would be and how incredibly sore I was. Even worse, I suddenly became aware of the effects of the IV fluid. “I need to go pee,” I said to Greg. I hadn’t drunk much, but I’d gone through a few saline bags already that I knew of. “Can you please help me get up?”
“Sure. What do you need?” Greg asked, uncertain what exactly to do.
“Everything,” I said. I was embarrassed. “Getting up off the bed seems impossible.” I couldn’t figure out what to do; it was so awkward—I had to bring the IV stand with me, since I was hooked up to it. “Pushing myself up off the bed is so unbelievably painful. I never realized how many muscles in my chest I use to do that.”
Slowly but surely, Greg adjusted the bed so that it was as upright as it could possibly be. Where were the nurses when I needed them? With my one hand on the bed and the other on the IV pole, and Greg’s hand ready to catch me but not sure where to hold on to me, I awkwardly and cautiously inched my way off the bed and shuffled to the bathroom. When I managed to sit down and pee, it felt like the longest pee ever. I started laughing in amazement, but caught myself right away because that hurt. I finished, covered myself up and shuffled back to my bed. The whole process took about twenty minutes.
“I’m glad they let me stay,” Greg said.
“Fortunately I can wipe myself, because I swear if I couldn’t do that, I might honestly start crying.” He propped me up and tucked pillows where I needed them. He was a huge help all night. It was unfathomable to me how I would have coped without his help. He put my slippers on, took them off, gave me water, and did everything else I needed and that we’d taken for granted I’d be able to do. The morphine helped, but not enough. I hurt like hell. If I was registering my pain on a scale of ten, it dropped it only from a nine to about a seven.
“I’m afraid you can only get it every four hours,” the nurse said.
“But it’s wearing off after three.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t increase the frequency.”
The only other time I had received morphine was during childbirth, when it had seemed to work. “Makes me realize how excruciating this pain is,” I told Greg. Sleeping was difficult. I was used to lying on my side and stomach, and couldn’t do that. Lying on my back all night long was awful.
With morning came a new nurse and another round of morphine. “How are you doing?”
“Not good. It hurts.”
“You should be feeling better with the morphine. Why don’t we try some Percocet?”
“Anything to help.” I forgot my earlier reservations about the drug.
“It’ll make you more drowsy than the morphine,” she warned, “but less constipated, if that’s been a problem.” I hadn’t noticed an issue because I hadn’t eaten much since the surgery, but that was certainly something I wanted to avoid. And drowsiness wasn’t a negative. Percocet it was! Within about twenty minutes of swallowing that magical pill, I realized it would be my drug of choice—it dropped the pain to a five and relaxed me. I closed my eyes and dropped off for about an hour, oblivious to what was going on around me. When I woke up, around eight A.M., I was feeling a bit better. I knew the more I slept, the less I would hurt. And as I began t
o feel better, I was anxious to get through the snowstorm and back home.
“You’ll need to have a quick visit from the surgeons first, and then the doctor on call has to discharge you,” the nurse said when she came back. “And I also need to show you how to take care of the drains that have been inserted. Let’s do that now before the doctor comes.” Before I had a chance to argue, she propped me up and started undressing my wounds.
I had to face my new boobless body, whether I liked it or not. I wasn’t looking forward to that. I looked down. I still had my gown on, but I noticed a definite change. I wasn’t as flat-chested as I had imagined I would be. In fact, I was happily surprised at the size of the breasts I already had. There were also three drains—one on my right side and two on my left. They were long tubes, and at the end of each was a clear plastic bottle or reservoir, about the size of those plastic lemons filled with lemon juice that you can buy at the grocery store. I felt like Frankenstein’s monster.
“The reservoir has a clip so you can attach it to your clothing.” The nurse showed me what she meant. “That way it won’t continually pull away from the incision site.” On the inside of my body, underneath my new implants, she explained, there was a flat piece of plastic that had a bunch of holes in it to help with drainage. “The drains need to be ‘milked’ regularly because they act like a siphon system. You have to squeeze all the air out of the bottle to create suction. That will drain excess fluid from the surgery site.”
I’m positive both Greg and I looked appalled and fascinated at the same time.
“And just pull the tubing, which is stretchy, gently a few times to force any fluid that’s in it to the end of the tube, where it’ll collect in this reservoir.” The reservoir was clear. She showed us the volume measurements that were marked on the side. “Measure the fluid, then record the volume, and each time you do that, empty and reattach the reservoir. You’ll need to do that once every three to four hours at first for each drain. As time goes on, the reservoirs will collect less and less fluid and you’ll need to empty them less frequently.”
Holding on to Normal Page 15
