My pre-op appointment

So the nurse Laura called and gave us all the ins and outs of what we need to prepare for surgery. All of the vitamins I am taking can be continued, surprising for how long the list is of the items that you cannot take. I must discontinue the probiotic thought the day of the surgery. That baffles me. Your body needs that good bacteria. So I will do more research on that.

She didn't know much about the procedure itself and what was happening with the scar tissue and the scar revision on the left breast. So she had Dr. Hardy call me a couple days later with some explanation. The left breast that was radiated behaves like dead skin tissue. The skin will not be as pliable as the right. He will put an implant under the muscle. It is a silicone high profile implant that is 450cc and the right is 400cc. The problem with getting it in there neatly is separating the scar tissue away from the chest wall enough. There is also the issue that because the left brest is so tight and has lost so much mass that the left and right breast may not be in the same place (symmetrically). This means also that one nipple may be higher than another. So no different than it is now!! One way that this can be fixed is by cutting a crescent piece of skin out from underneath the nipple and stitching it back together. This is not an option that he likes to do. He feels it is just too much cutting and scarring. The other thing that surgeons will do, which is what the first Dr. was going to do that I had a consultation with, is to do fat grafting. They will take fat from another place in the body and inject it into your breast to pump up the piece that is missing. That tissue will eventually die. If I were to have it looked at in a mammogram they would see it as foreign and think that it is cancerous. They would biopsy it and find out that it is not cancerous. He says that it is just not a good ethical thing to do. That option is off the table. He said basically that when we go in he will just use his best judgment and decide then what needs to be done. I pray that he will have good judgement.

I am now 2 weeks out from surgery and I am starting to get nervous...but excited all in the same breath.