May love and laughter light your days, and warm your heart and home.
May good and faithful friends be yours, wherever you may roam.
May peace and plenty bless your world with joy that long endures.
May all life's passing seasons bring the best to you and yours!
~ Robert Frost

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog. This is my story of how I faced my risk of breast cancer, the decisions I made, the support I received and my week by week recovery from surgery. I chose to have a prophylactic bilateral mastectomy with immediate DIEP reconstruction at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston (March 2010). For more information on my 'Medical Team' please see tab above. I also have a wonderful circle of friends who have supported me throughout. They have provided us with lots of delicious meals and desserts. Many of those recipes are included above under "Feed the Flap" recipes. "Feed the Flap" is a term I coined when trying to increase my abdominal (fat) flap to ensure that I was a good candidate for the DIEP procedure. This was not something recommended by any medical professional, it was just something that made sense to me. I think it worked!! Feel free to join me on this journey and feel free to post comments.

Select the tabs on the left side marked Week 1, Week 2, Week 3..... to go immediately to the surgical/recovery part of this blog.


Friday, April 2, 2010

Day 5

Today is Friday. Either I will be out today or tomorrow. Since we live four hours away they will probably keep me one more day. Plus the better shape I am in the better the ride will be for DH. At our pre-admission consult with the PS, he wished DH luck on the way home. I had just exhausted him and his nurse with four pages of questions from pain to breast size to pain back to breast size. He never changed his answers. It was only my questions that changed. I like that about him - never over promising. The deal is that he would rebuild my breasts with my 'fat flap' and the unstated, would do a remarkable job. Hopefully it all took.

UPDATE:  We are home!!! Mike just finished emptying my drains. Aunt Dot did a remarkable job of watching our 7 year old who seemed to grow up in just a week and our 4 year old who seemed to totally fall apart in just one week. We are all getting readjusted to the new mom. They've played on my hospital bed. They want to see the scars, but we are holding off on that for a while. I have to still get used to them.

The ride home was so much easier than expected. We stopped at Mike's sister's house in Freeport for a break then got home about 3:30. The girls and Aunt Dot had made a special cake for me with strawberries and we have been sitting in the sun on the patio.

We plan to continue to blog to recount some of the highs and lows of the whole experience. I am happy. I picked the perfect team at Beth Israel and other than a rough ride with anesthesia it was uneventful. Getting up for my first walk was the highlight along with the first shower and the first good night's sleep.

For now I am going to head out to catch the last few rays of sun before we all sit down for a lobster dinner!!! Thanks to all the doctors, nurses and staff at BIDMC.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Joan,
What a beautiful day to get home. We all complain about how quick people get discharged from the hospital nowadays, but the reality is, it is so much better at home. I hope you sleep well,
Jane

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