Three Weeks Out

Hello!! I am officially three weeks out from surgery! And what a difference every week has made! It's amazing how God created our bodies to heal so quickly! 20 days ago I couldn't sit up in bed. But, today I dragged a chair across my living room floor.

I'm not exactly supposed to be lifting anything more than 5 pounds (thank goodness this is finally up from ONE pound a few days ago!) but it's really ridiculous to expect anyone to be able to go through a normal day and not lift 5 pounds. So, I'm relinquishing my "A+ patient" title and I'm unabashadly cheating!

Here's the lowdown:
Surgery lasted 10 hours, the first two of which I think were spent on the "precautionary" mastectomy on the cancer-free side. When I woke up in the recovery room, I saw my doctor through hazy eyes and my first spoken words out of anesthesia... well, they had to do with my anatomy and it might be a little too familiar to share here. The nurse standing near me at the time laughed, and I fell back into a druggy sleep that lasted several days. I have very little memory of any hospital days. What I do remember is regret. I was in a lot of pain and I kept thinking that I'd made the wrong decision. Unfortunately, my blood pressure really dropped the day after surgery and they started messing with my pain meds to rectify the situation and the result was blood pressure that never rose back to normal numbers, and no freedom from pain either.

I spent 5 days in the hospital, 2 days (is that right?) at Mel's to avoid my hyper children and the stairs leading to our apartment. Thankfully, we've had the most wonderful babysitter helping us these last few weeks, so I pretty much spent that first week at home in a stupor of drugs and naps.

Now, three weeks out, my pain is minimal, and I only really notice it as night when my stomach and the area below my ribcage is really tight. So, I'm not getting much sleep, which most of you will benefit from because sleep-deprived Sarah is a little goofier than normal!

I am half the size that I used to be in my chest. But surprisingly, I feel no different than before. Isn't it odd that it felt normal before my diagnosis, it felt normal after the mastectomy, it felt normal wearing the prosthesis, and it feels normal now being half of what I'm used to? What does that say about how temporal these bodies are? I'm glad I'm not overly attached to it!

So, in the end, we are going to have 2 more, small operations to sort of "tidy things up." The first of which will be a week from Friday. And, I have no more regrets because my plastic surgeon made it clear that implants would have failed because none of my skin that previously went through radiation was usable at all, and the doctors had to use all skin from my stomach on that side.

Thanks for all the cards, well-wishes and prayers! Pray that I can avoid lifting so we can make it through the recovery process smoothly.