Let’s see….where did I end off last time? Oh yes…I think I was frantically prepping for surgery and trying to enjoy some chips and dip, followed by a glass of yummy egg nog before the clock struck midnight. J Ha!
Following my midnight snack, I proceeded to follow the instructions for showering the night before surgery. (And they don’t just tell you to jump in the shower before going to the hospital. Nope….they give you very SPECIFIC instructions including a list of accepted anti-bacterial soaps that you are supposed to use.) The sheet of paper from the surgeon states that you should wash with special soap a good 3 or 4 times from your chin to your toes, concentrating specifically on surgical incision areas the night before surgery and then again the morning of. I showered at about midnight, slept in fresh clean sheets for a couple of hours (another tip on the surgical instruction sheet) and then got up around 6 something to do it all over again. Needless to say, I think that I was pretty darn clean!
My surgery was scheduled to start at 9:00 a.m. on 11/12/13, so we needed to be at the hospital around 7:00 for check-in. Once we got there, they gave me a number of hospital bracelets to wear…1 white, 1 red, 1 yellow and 1 pink.
The WHITE one stated my name and had several scannable “QR barcodes” on it. (from Wikipedia: A Quick Response code consists of black square dots arranged in a square grid, which can be read by an imaging device.) Every time they would give me a new medication they would confirm my name and birth date with me verbally, and then they would use a little cash register scanner of sorts to scan the barcode on my bracelet.
The RED one stated my allergies to medecine.
The YELLOW one stated that I was a fall risk…not because of my sheer gracefulness, but because of my anesthesia. (And YES I had to look up how to spell anesthesia J).
And the PINK one was a “limb alert” bracelet. Once you have had lymph nodes removed on one side of your body, they advise against having blood pressures taken or IVs drawn from that side due to the risk of something called Lymphedema. (Lymphedema involves swelling in the limb that can be controlled, but not cured.)
I was still a little apprehensive about being under for such a long period of time, but every nurse I talked to that morning reassured me that I really shouldn’t worry about it and that they had everything under control. Alrighty then….time to just let that go! J
Aaron sat with me as I was prepped in my pre-op room (vitals, IV placement, etc.), and then around 9:00 I was off to surgery. I don’t remember much accept feeling uneasy as they poked and prodded on the back of my spine in the operating room before they began. The next 11 hours are a blur. Ok….I don’t know if I can even call them a blur, because I really don’t remember any of it.
I wasn’t sure if I was going to feel “rested” after being out for most of the day, but I did indeed wake up groggy and tired. (Probably as a result of being on pain meds.) After numerous requests that morning, I was pleasantly surprised to wake up in a private room at about 8:30 p.m. Surgery took a good 9 hours and then I was in the recovery room for another 2 hours after that.
Aaron (bless his heart) never left my side. He slept on an uncomfortable chair all night long as the hospital staff came in every hour to check on me. Their check-ins consisted of taking my temperature, my blood pressure, checking my oxygen levels, administering medication, and examining my newly formed breasts.
For those of you that don’t know, I did not have implants or expanders for my reconstruction. Instead, I chose to do the TRAM flap procedure, which consisted of the surgeon using my own skin, fat, and muscle (taken from my abdomen) to construct new breasts. It is a lengthy surgery because the surgeon needs to be very precise in lining up the blood vessels on my chest after taking the tissue off of my abdomen. (For those of you that have had twins, you know how stretched out your skin gets and no matter what you do, it always just kind of hangs there. This was just an added bonus gift after all that I have had to endure this year. *big smile*)
In addition to observing my breasts visually and feeling the skin each hour, the nurses also used a Doppler machine to listen to them. Wait a minute….isn’t that something you hear on the weather channel? Well yes, it is, but it is also a tool that they use in the hospital.
The Doppler machine has a cord with a small silver wand at the end (see picture below). They put an ultrasound-type gel on the end of the wand and they use it to monitor the blood flow in and out of your “flap”. If the blood flow is not sufficient to the new breasts, there is a risk of partial or complete loss of the tissue flap. (Insufficient blood flow is a bad thing and can require extra surgical care, that’s why they monitor this every hour for at least the first day or so.) Needless to say, I was happy to hear them find that “wispy-heartbeat-type-sound” every hour that they checked for it. J
Despite being woken up every hour for check-ups, what am I feeling? Besides feeling a little out of it, I feel HOT because they have a heated blanket on top of me (to encourage circulation to my new breast tissue) and the insides of my ELBOWS really hurt. And YES, I said elbows. Not breasts. Elbows. *smile* I could not for the life of me figure out why I couldn’t feel ANY pain on my breasts at all, but the inside portion of my arms REALLY hurt!?! What?
After quizzing the medical staff, I realized that my arms had been strapped down straight for a good 9 hours and that is why they were sore! Well DUH! Why didn’t I think of that? Now that I know why it hurts to straighten my arms….what can we do about it? Ahhh yes, ice packs! Regardless of how silly I must have looked, I was happy to have some relief, even if it only included having cool arms amidst the hot flashes of the heated blanket all night long.
Morning arrived and my surgeon stopped by to check me over. She was pleased with how the surgery went and said things were looking good so far. Hooray!
(You can click on the picture collage to enlarge it. More pictures to come in another post...)
Stay tuned for more information on the rest of my hospital stay and my recovery…
Thank you for your thoughts and prayers on that day and every day! There is POWER in prayer and I truly believe that…
Love to all,
Nae
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