Surgery - Tale Two

My lumpectomy was supposed to be a later in the morning surgery, which was nice since we had to go to Idaho Falls for that one and the weather was not cooperative.  But the day before I got a call telling me to be there by 6am.  I called my trusty friend Kara, and she once again came to my rescue and took me, waited with me and brought me home. 

Well there was a lot to do before I could even get to surgery. Turns out the first stop after getting the IV in was to Nuclear Medicine where I had radioactive stuff put into my left breast.  It stung really bad and I had a nurse there holding my hand for it.  Then they took some pics with a big machine and sent me on to the ultrasound lab.  There I got a metal rod placed through the tumor via ultrasound guidance.  Then to the mammography department to make sure they did it correctly.  I was in horrible pain by this time.  I had my previous surgery just a week before and I was not allowed to take anything after midnight, so all my pain meds had worn off and my hysterectomy incisions were hurting A LOT!  My gurney was extremely uncomfortable and my poor bottom got tired of sitting, but just shifting to another position was bad, so I held pretty still. We went to preop and waited and waited and waited, I kept hoping they would just come put me out of my misery.  I was so grateful for Kara being there. Again, she made a difficult situation fun.

My funny story from this surgery is that I remember waking up and looking around and I could not see a thing, everything was far too blurry.  I closed my eyes and tried again. Without a word a nurse came and wiped my eyes and suddenly I could see again. In my drugged up state I thought, "Oh, I was crying, so that was it".  When I went back to my first room to get ready to go I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I had a big circle of something like Vaseline around my eyes. I had two white spots on my forehead from some kind of monitoring and apparently breast surgery required oodles of orange betadine be used to clean half of your face as well as your chest.  I looked like a clown. I was just glad I saw it before I got home! No need to traumatize the kids further.

After surgery it did not take me long to be discharged and home we went and to bed I went.  Lucky for me Adrienne and Jon moved back to Rexburg the next day and they stayed their first night with us.  I was so relieved, because it was New Years Eve and I was NOT going to stay up until midnight.  As it turned out, Joseph went to a friends party and got home around 10:30 and went to bed.  Annalina went to her first church dance and got home after midnight.  The rest of us went to be before the ball dropped and that was just fine with me! 

I am pretty good at taking care of others when they are sick or need help, but myself?  Not so much.  After two days of pain meds after surgery number 2 I figured I had been on them long enough, so I stopped taking them. Ouch, big mistake. It took me another day or two to get the pain back under control.  Christmas break was a blur, it seemed like before I knew it, the kids were going back to school without me. 

Little did I know at the time, that a third surgery was looming in my future.  More on that later!