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By STEPHANIE LAW
Staff Writer Monday, August 13, 2007

Editor’s Note: Seventh in a series of columns about one woman’s journey through the often-scary world of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment.

I had to get up with the birds the day my bilateral mastectomy for breast cancer was scheduled.

As a second-shift worker, I usually sleep until almost noon, so getting up at 5 a.m. was a new, and not particularly pleasant, experience. Some nights, that’s the time I’m crawling into bed. I couldn’t eat breakfast, in fact, hadn’t eaten since about 9 p.m. the night before.

When I had my lumpectomy, I ate a sandwich at 11:45 p.m. and the stomach acid it generated could have contributed to problems I had with the anesthesia. I had learned my lesson: No food or drink for me; just a sip of water to wash down my morning pills.

I took a shower and while I was drying off, I took a last look at myself in the mirror and then said goodbye to “the girls.” The scenery would be a lot different the next time I took a shower, I thought.

A friend took me to the hospital and I was taken to a room where I donned a standard johnnie. I understand the need for an easy-access garment, but does it have to be so unflattering and drafty? Couldn’t we maintain a little dignity here?

My next stop was the nuclear medicine laboratory. The surgeon was going to remove sentinel lymph nodes to see whether the cancer cells had spread from my right breast into my lymphatic system. The technician injected a radioactive material, which would travel into a node and allow the surgeon to find it using a sort of Geiger. Then she’d remove the node and send it to the pathology lab for analysis.

I had been warned that this injection might hurt — some women find it extremely painful. It didn’t hurt me as much as the injection of Novacaine I had before the lumpectomy. And the technician reassured me I didn’t get enough radioactive material to glow in the dark.

I waited about 90 minutes for that stuff to make its way to its destination, and then I was taken into surgery. At least that’s what I was told — I don’t really remember much of the rest of that day.

After surgery, the first thing I noticed was that my throat was sore. Apparently the anesthesiologist had a difficult time inserting the endotracheal tube. When told to just relax and open my mouth, I clenched my jaws tight. I wasn’t going down without a fight.

When I got to my room, I was given a morphine drip along with other intravenous fluids and a little button I could push for more morphine when the pain was severe. I don’t remember pushing that button more than a couple times but was told I pushed it quite often, all the while saying I hated how the morphine made me feel.

About every 10 minutes, I would tell my friend that the only severe pain I felt was under my right arm. And every 10 minutes, my patient friend would respond that’s where the surgeon went digging for the lymph node.

My chest was enclosed in a 10-inch wide purple flowered “binder” (sort of like a girdle, but worn higher) and I had a tube sutured under my skin under each arm. Attached to that tube was a plastic bulb (a little smaller than a baseball) that collected the fluid draining from the surgical site.

The next morning, my surgeon came to check on me and, to my amazement, said I could go home after the nurse showed me how to empty and measure the fluid from the drains.

She did one drain, explaining what she was doing, and then I did the other one. Piece of cake, I thought. All the IV tubes were removed, I dressed carefully and slowly and my friend drove me home.

NEXT: Recovering from surgery

Stephanie Law is a copy editor at the newspaper and lives in Sabattus.

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