[2023-07-11] Recovery day 4
The interesting thing about recovering from a surgery, illness or treatment is that a day is not homogeneous—consistently good or bad from start to finish. This morning, for example, I felt especially tired, more so than I had felt since the day of the surgery. And I felt a little stiff and achy upon getting up for the first time. I suspect that I'm feeling the effects of the cumulative days of poor sleep.
But by the afternoon, I was feeling better. My husband insists that if I push myself now, I will simply extend my recovery time. And he's right. So I'm sitting quietly.
I neither want to underplay nor overplay my recovery from a mastectomy with reconstruction. I try to faithfully represent what it feels like to have gone through the surgery. At breakfast this morning, I was telling my daughter that I'm still in that stage of "I made the correct choice, right?" It's easy to temporarily forget my rationale for this decision when I'm experiencing pain and fatigue.
My daughter succinctly made the case in support of the decision I took: I would regret having passed up the opportunity to have a prophylactic bilateral mastectomy if I were diagnosed with breast cancer in the future. And if I were diagnosed with breast cancer, I added, I would have to go through everything I'm going through now, plus potentially more extensive surgery (if my lymph nodes were implicated) as well as chemotherapy and radiation for a second time in my life. What's more, I would need to continue having annual mammograms and breast MRIs and potentially biopsies if the diagnostic tests identified anything suspicious, with all the stress associated with such tests.
I will never know if I might have managed to avoid breast cancer without the mastectomy—my chances were, at best, 50% and, at worst, 15%. But I do know that if I had gotten breast cancer, I would have regretted not having made the decision I made.
I recall Dr. Cordeiro's most compelling argument for proceeding with the surgery when we spoke in June 2021. As I wrote in 2b or not 2b, she told me:
I definitely hear a lot of people tell me that they want to do the surgery because they don't want to have to go home and tell their kids that they have cancer. They don't want their families to have to see them go through cancer treatments. They don't want to have to go through chemotherapy.... And you wouldn't want to be diagnosed with breast cancer and think to yourself, "Why didn't I do that?"
That one statement sums up eloquently why I decided to proceed with the prophylactic bilateral mastectomy. It reassures me to reread it now.
As Dr. Cordeiro alluded, a cancer diagnosis affects not just the patient but their family as well. As much as I've been through, my family has been through it too—watching me navigate treatments and tests, side effects and recovery. I imagine that the decision I made gives them as much peace of mind as it does me.
