I’ve been spending all my time and energy on healing these days. This has been incredibly grueling, physically. And yet at the same time, I’m starting to go a bit stir crazy with all the sitting and laying around. Need a recommendation on shows to binge watch? I’m your girl.
I’m incredibly grateful to finally be free of the leg pain. It stuck around for a little over a week and made me pretty damn miserable. But it’s finally gone and it feels like a new lease on life, even as new pains set in.
The second surgery went very well. It was a much easier process in so many ways, but for some reason, I was way more anxious heading in to this one. I didn’t know what to expect with the anesthesia. I wouldn’t be under general anesthesia but how much would I be aware of? I was still feeling really ambivalent about having to do the surgery anyway.
This was another opportunity for me to be much more vocal about my needs than I might have been in the past. I knew I would get an opportunity to talk to the anesthesiologist before the surgery. After he went through his spiel about what anesthesia he would use and asking me questions about my prior experience with it, he asked if I had any questions. I told him that I was feeling pretty anxious.
“I can help you with that!” he said with an incredibly reassuring confidence. He told me that I would be heavily sedated, meaning I would be in a deep sleep, but able to breathe on my own. “I will be right by your head the whole time,” he said. I began to relax a bit.
The nurse who arrived to walk me to the operating room was the same nurse for my mastectomy. She remembered me.
And then I got to the operating room and my surgeon held my hand again as I went to sleep. It is truly the most beautiful gesture.
Fast forward: the pathology report has already come back and it’s clean. It’s good news. I won’t dwell on whether that means that it was an unnecessary surgery after all. There would be no way of knowing without doing the surgery. When my surgeon called to give me the results of the pathology report, she said, “I’m sorry for your loss.” I smiled and thought that might just be the best thing she could have said.
Back to healing.