[2023-08-03] More surgery and more recovery
When I came to The Ottawa Hospital yesterday for what I thought would be a routine examination of my infected right breast, I did not expect to hear that the implant needed to come out immediately. Dr. St. Denis-Katz informed me that it was too contaminated with bacteria to be salvaged with antibiotics. She told me that I would be admitted to hospital to await surgery that very day or the next day. I left the examination room and found a chair in a secluded area of the waiting room to await news of next steps.
Over the next few hours, Dr. St. Denis-Katz came to see me to provide updates, something she could likely have asked someone else to. But I appreciated the fact that she gave every new bit of information to me personally.
My surgery occurred this morning at about 8:00 AM. Dr. Zhang, the surgeon who performed my reconstruction a month ago, was my surgeon today. The first thing she said to me when she saw me this morning outside the operating room was, "I'm so sorry this has happened to you." I appreciated hearing that.
She removed the right implant, sewed up the skin, and installed a drain. (Yes, I will have to contend with another drain. Ugh.)
All the operating room personnel were amazing, from the nurses (especially nurse Jennifer, who greeted me with such warmth), to the assisting surgeons (especially Dr. Bitoiu, who explained the procedure to me), to the anesthesiology team (especially Dr. Gu, who recognized me from my bilateral mastectomy a month ago).
My left breast remains intact, implant and all. As you can imagine, I am lopsided: one large breast on the left and no breast on the right. I thought that this situation would cause significant sadness and embarrassment, but so far, that's not the case. This is just who I am, now and for the foreseeable future. But not forever.
At some point in the coming days or week, I will be fitted with a prosthesis to create a balanced profile in clothes. This situation reminds me of losing my hair to chemotherapy when I went through treatment for ovarian cancer. The anticipation was worse than the reality.
As for the future, I'm likely looking at 6 to 12 months before my surgeons will contemplate any sort of reconstruction. When all is said and done, I think I will have cycled through every possible option for reconstruction. Imagine the wisdom and empathy I will gain from this latest issue. I have to find some silver lining in this black cloud.
Things I don't want to forget
Yesterday morning, while I was waiting outside the room where I had received the bad news, I started to shiver—a combination of the cold temperature in the hospital and the shock I was feeling. So I went to the receptionist at the check-in desk for the surgery module, asking if it was possible to get a warm blanket. Calandra said she would check with the nurses, then returned almost immediately to say, "I'll go find you one." A minute later, Calandra delivered a warm blanket to me, finding me around the corner where I had taken refuge in the extreme end of the surgery module waiting area.
Later, Calandra notified me that a bed was ready for me on 7 West (the 7th floor of the hospital's west wing). This is the same area where I stayed for five days following surgery for ovarian cancer in 2020, and one day after having developed an infection following surgery for perianal skin cancer in 2021. Indeed, my first nurse, Erin, said that my name looked familiar. Although she had not been my nurse in 2020 or 2021, she remembered seeing my name in the system (Hollington is not a common name). It was heartwarming to know that I had been remembered fondly.
Nurse Alex arrived soon after (Erin had been filling in for her) and she was absolutely lovely as well: kind, efficient and positive. She was with me for the day and returned in the morning to care for me on my second day. Nurse Sarah took care of me overnight. How she and her colleague nurses stay so gentle and friendly at all hours of the day and night is amazing to me.
At 7:30 AM, my first porter—a lovely young man named Patrick—arrived to take me to the surgery department. After I got settled in the bed and he started wheeling me to the surgery unit, I asked my standard opener: "How long have you been working here?" Six years was his response. He proceeded to tell me that he is working part-time at the hospital (mortgage to pay) and going to school part-time at the University of Ottawa. I asked him what he was studying: communications. How coincidental, I thought, that someone working in healthcare was studying communications. I mentioned to Patrick that I had been the Assistant Deputy Minister of Communications for Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada before I retired. I invited him to connect with me when he graduates, noting that I am on several social media platforms. He said he would.
After we got to the surgery unit, Patrick passed me off to my second porter, Marcel. To my standard question, Marcel responded that he had been with The Ottawa Hospital since 1999. I thought that was amazing. As he was wheeling me down the hall, I noticed a rack of brightly coloured costumes. It reminded me of a video I had seen recently about a surgeon who dresses his young patients in superhero costumes before taking the children to their operations. In some shots in the video, Dr. Leandro Brandão from Brazil carries the children over his shoulder as though they were flying. So when I saw the costumes at The Ottawa Hospital, I thought that maybe TOH surgeons occasionally dressed up for their patients. "What's with all the costumes?" I asked Marcel. He paused for a moment, no doubt trying to figure out what I was referring to. "Do you mean the lead aprons for x-rays?" Oh, that's what they are, I thought. You see, I had left my glasses in my room, as per hospital protocol, so I wasn't seeing clearly.
Later, I wasn't hearing properly. When nurse Alex came into my room with my final infusion of antibiotics, I thought she had said, "I'll add this to your second dirty line." It took a second for me to realize that she had said, "secondary line." When I don't quite catch something that someone says, I substitute a word or phrase that sounds right and makes sense to me—sometimes with funny results.
As I've shared with a few close friends what I've been going through over the last 1½ days, one sent a response that made me laugh. She said, "knowing you, you are a trooper and keeping everything positive and in perspective (I would be losing my ‘sh*t’)." That made me laugh out loud. I'm not one to fall apart when I get bad medical news. I may go into shock, as I think I did yesterday, but I try to focus on what I'm supposed to do.
That said, last night was challenging. I was awake for portions of the night, partly because of physical discomfort and partly because of emotional discomfort. There was a lot of time for thinking after the Duolingo and Sudoku had been put away for the night because I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer. In the witching hours of the night, I ruminated on past conversations, actions I did or didn't take, actions healthcare professionals did or didn't take. I wondered, with some sadness, whether things could have been different if one or more actions had gone another way.
But I know such thinking is not healthy, and only sends me down a rabbit hole. Now that the surgery is over, my focus is on the present. With the surgery behind me and the pressure in my right breast relieved, I have bounced back. I'm heartened to know that the healthcare team has done the first and most important step in ridding my body of the bacteria inside it. I'll still be on a tonne of antibiotics (two, in fact) to make sure the infection truly goes away. But I'll get through this, as I always do.
I was to have had lunch today with a dear friend. We were going to celebrate my success in recovering from the bilateral mastectomy and reconstruction. I told her that the cake would be my booby prize—"a prize given as a joke to the last-place finisher in a race or competition." I haven't heard or used the term booby prize in years, not since the euchre tournaments at the community hall in Ferguson Falls when I was a kid. It struck me as funny, punny and ironic.
Alas, the lunch with my friend did not happen. It will have to wait. Before hearing of my emergency surgery, she had ordered me a special cake (chocolate hazelnut mousse). She offered to have Chris pick up the cake for me and my family to enjoy. I accepted that offer with immense gratitude. When we arrived at her place, she and her husband came out to meet Chris. Hearing my friend's voice, I had to get out of the car and give her a hug. Though her homemade chicken-vegetable soup and chocolate mousse cake would be devoured later, her hug alone was worth stopping for.
So many people feel helpless when a loved one is going through a difficult time and they want to provide support. The best thing we can do, for them and for us, is to let them help—to accept their gifts. Some gifts are tangible, like food, flowers and pyjamas. Others are intangible, like the friend going through breast cancer who spent an hour with me on the phone last night, swapping stories and sympathies, and the family members who are already sending me new nicknames (I'll save those for another post).
Apologies for last night's cryptic post
I'm sorry if last night's post alarmed people. When I first got the news that my right implant would need to come out as soon as possible, I felt despondent to the point that I didn't know if I could muster the energy to post anything in Jenesis. "Perhaps this is the day when the great Jenesis streak comes to an end," I thought.
But when I got to my room, I was feeling better. When I was told that I could be whisked away to surgery within an hour, I decided to quickly cobble together something, since no post at all might have been even more alarming to regular readers than the cryptic one I did publish.
The friend who has breast cancer and who chatted with me last night said my post was akin to "holding lines"—a term we use in government communications to refer to a few sentences we pull together when an issue crops up and spokespersons need something to say until we can gather and share more information. I laughed at that reference. Over almost 50 years, my friend and I have had some moments when our lives have converged: we grew up in the same community, we worked in the same organization several times during our career, and we are going through breast health issues at the same time. One of the things she had said was that if she had known then what she knows now, she might have made a different decision. I felt the same. But I also pointed out that had she made a decision similar to mine, she might have faced the same complications and second guessed that decision. We agreed that breast surgery, whether to deal with cancer or to avoid cancer, is fraught with challenges. While many women don't talk about their experience publicly, they willingly share their disappointments, doubts and depression privately. I have benefited from these quiet conversations.
That's why I feel doubly committed to sharing my story—what one woman called the good, the bad and the ugly. It helps other women feel not so alone and to realize that no matter what decision we take we can always second guess ourselves. Let's not take that on.
Since my bilateral mastectomy with reconstruction, I had been calling my posts "recovery day" plus a number. But last night, I felt like my recovery days had been reset to zero.
In truth, though, I'm not really back at zero. All the healing my body did to recover from the removal of breast tissue has not been undone and that removal appears to have allowed me to subvert breast cancer. All the healing of my left breast from reconstruction remains a success. While I'm no longer on the cusp of 100% recovery, I'm still 75% of the way there. And what I go through in the next year to reach 100% will allow me to gain so much knowledge of the various reconstruction options to share with others. Stay tuned for future stories on that.
Thank you for your support. I am truly humbled by, and grateful for, your love.
And still we carry on, and we get through.
