Whew - it has been a WEEK or two. Turns out the “putting em back on” portion of things is much more extensive than the taking ‘em off part. The type of reconstruction I chose involves taking your belly tissue, moving it up to your chest, shaping it (there is more shaping in another surgery in 3 months), reattaching it to a blood supply and closing everything back up. The three days of inpatient post-surgery were relatively dreamy - lots of chocolate pudding, pain meds, awesome nurses and no one needing anything from me except to know my pain score which, by the time I was discharged, was a totally manageable five. (I hate those things. I never say a number higher than nine because if you get to ten then you have nowhere to go but what if the pain gets worse? Can you go to 11? Stress.)

After a few days at home I got an infection. I realized something wasn’t right when I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and my legs were shaking so badly my knees were literally knocking. If I could stop that then my teeth started chattering so hard it felt like I was going to break one. I chattered and sweated through the night, was put on antibiotics the next day and had another pretty miserable night.

From all the science I have been taking in the lead up to nursing school my big, overarching takeaway has been one word - homeostasis. Everything in our bodies has a certain rate at which it operates and if anything gets faster or slower or more or less, you’ve got issues. That second night it felt like everything was so far from it’s baseline - I couldn’t regulate my body temperature or control my limbs. I kept feeling like it I fell asleep I would stop breathing. I told Jeremy he had to stay awake and watch me so I didn’t die. I also apparently asked him to buy me a tiger. I blame the later on the drugs. All joking aside, it was fucking scary. Jeremy took awesome care of me and told me later I was almost septic and that he had already called the surgeon and the ER to be ready to expect me if it came to that. DoctorHusband perk for sure.

I’ve been steadily improving since and am feeling good. No pain, feeling mostly like myself with a leakier than usual brain, and a walk around the block feels like I’m trying to summit Everest.

With the two major surgeries behind me the next step is figuring out what kind of meds I need to be on. There was some talk of chemo but in the end my oncologist decided (much to my delight) that it was unclear enough if I would benefit from chem, and that going through it (especially right now with Ye Olde Covids) the benefit did not outweigh the risk so no chemo for meo. My tumor was fed almost entirely by estrogen so, because of the chance that a few cancer cells broke off into my bloodstream and will eventually find somewhere to regrow (and it’s not a teeny chance since the pathology report showed some vascular invasion) the best solution is apparently to make it so my body no longer produces estrogen.

Most estrogen comes from the ovaries I can either have mine removed or can have a shot every month to turn them off. The shot option was a no brainer since I am feeling super over surgeries as of late. They will also give me an additional medicine to stop any other estrogen production. So, as far as I can tell, that means that today I am a 43 year old pre-menopausal woman and when I walk out of the lab on Thursday I will essentially be hurtled into menopause. While this sounds better than dying from cancer it doesn’t sound super fun. I know people have really varied experiences with menopause so I’m hoping that mine is relatively benign, although the oncologist was gently telling me that the first few months usually suck donkey dick. Awesome.

Besides Cancer and Rona, Zeni finished elementary school and Hayden finished middle school. Watching them feel proud of their accomplishments was great, even if the celebrations occured mostly in cars and all without actual contact with other human beings. I’m trying to piece my brain back together enough to finish biochemistry and microbiology, Jeremy is being very kind about my bossy requests, and we just planned a trip to Glacier National Park for August - a taste of normalcy!