What I did to you

This week I saw my surgeon for my 6-month checkup. Mostly it was lots of questions:

Any pain? Random twinges and pulls, some painful, but mostly annoying

Heart palpitations, racing or irregular heartbeat? Only during hot flashes

Side effects from the Tamoxifen? hot flashes, mood swings, big gray cloud over my head a couple weeks at a time, random periods...

Fun stuff.

As I expected, we talked about the reconstruction issue. She thinks I should see some good reconstructions and talk with some women who have done it after their mastectomies, not during. She also gave me the names of two surgeons to consult.


One of the reasons I like my surgeon is that she doesn't pull punches about what she does, and she always recognizes that, in the end, it's my body. So, she told me not to rush into anything, but she also expressed that , "What I did to you was brutal". And, living this way forever doesn't work for a lot of women. She also went through the process, that it will take several months and involves 3 outpatient surgeries and a process of stretching the muscle and skin from the inside.

We also talked about the prosthetics and my dislike of their feel, weight, and the whole fakeness of it all for me. I know that they work for thousands of women, but for me, I worry that I'd just always feel like people could tell I was wearing fake boobs, kind of like the tissue in the bra in jr. high!

I'm not sure yet that I don't feel the same way about implants, but I'll check it out and then decide. Mostly I'm just sick to pieces of thinking so much about a body part I didn't give much thought to at all before the cancer.

The Breastcancer.org site does a pretty good job, with personal reflections, of explaining what mastectomy does to women's psyche and the different ways women approach their post-cancer boob life (http://www.breastcancer.org/tips/reconstruction/index.jsp). Now, if they would just tell me what to do and make it easy to finally decide!