Surgery #7 done!!!

Yesterday, I went into the ambulatory surgery center for TNBC-related surgery #7. Wow, considering that before last March I had never had surgery under general anesthesia, I sure have come a long way in the past year with a total of seven such surgeries... I must admit I'm growing a bit weary of all that cutting-type stuff, though. Perhaps I don't want to be quite as much on the "cutting edge" in the future...

In any case, my surgery yesterday was scheduled for noon. But then of course, surgeries later in the day almost always start a bit later than planned since previous surgeries run longer -- and yesterday's surgery was no exception. The delay wasn't that long, but still, it made it that much harder for the anesthesiologist to find a usable vein in my right hand since I'm so dehydrated and hungry after having been more than thirteen hours NPO, that my tiny veins hide even more than usual. So the anesthesiologist decided to use a "volunteer" vein on the underside of my wrist with "just a little bee sting" of lidocaine to numb that sensitive area. I protested, telling her that last time someone did that I ended up with paralysis and all kinds of issues for weeks. But she didn't listen. Boy did that "little bee sting" hurt badly -- and when she had the IV in, it kept burning like crazy. I knew right away something was wrong. But they had just pushed my "milk of amnesia" to put me out, so I didn't find out what (if anything) they did about it. 

When I came to in the post anesthesia-recovery unit, not only was I in pain, but nauseous to boot. So the nurse gave me some IV zofran, which burned like crazy. When I complained, she checked my line, and sure enough, my wrist was ballooning up as though I had an egg growing under my skin. Yikes, something had shifted and rather than go into my blood stream as they should, the meds were ending up in my soft tissues. Not good. The nurse had to call the anesthesiologist back out to check that IV line, and she decided to pull it. Ah, what a relief!

Some pain meds and quite a bit of waiting later, they moved me into a chair and called in DH to keep me company. The surgery had taken two hours, and I spent another two hours waking up before DH was allowed to see me, and then almost another two hours after that before I felt strong enough to go home. This was certainly one of the more nauseous recoveries from surgery that I have had... But I guess all those previous six surgeries and that little bit of poison to which I was treated last summer did leave their mark...

In any case, I'm glad this (hopefully) last reconstruction surgery is over. At this point, the nausea is much better, and the pain is reasonably well controlled with vicodin. On Friday, I go see my boob man to have the stitches removed. Until then, unfortunately, only sponge baths for me... I'm looking forward to that first post-surgery shower -- always do! Sorry if this is TMI...

Oh, I almost forgot: The funny thing was that while I was drifting in and out of sleep in the post-anesthesia recovery unit, all of sudden I saw my other surgeon, the butcher, walking around. He saw me, beamed at me, and said a quick hi. Oddly, once while I was recovering in that very same bay after having the surgery with him where he placed my chemo port, I happened to see my boob man walk by. When he saw me then and said hi, he examined my tissue expander and said it wasn't expanding right -- but not to worry he would replace it on Friday (it was a Tuesday then). Thus I was glad that my quick conversation with the butcher did not result in further surgery this week!

So surgery #7 is over, and all I need to do now is recover. I hope the last reconstructive touches came out nicely, so I can heal, move on, and have a reasonably realistic reconstruction of my old self. Let the healing begin!