10.31.09
Zombie
While I was doing the wet to dry bandages before the debridment, I frequently felt like I was a zombie. No, I didn’t want to eat brains, though I DID want to severely damage the HiQ.
***WARNING! GRAPHIC CONTENT AHEAD***
No what I mean is that when I would peel off the wet to dry dressing and pull away bits of dead flesh, I couldn’t help but feel like I was, at least in part, an undead zombie. Here I was dropping bits of flesh. And that’s what zombies do…walk around, eat people and drop bits of their body.
Instead of eating people, I felt like this situation was eating me alive. And not just in the literal sense. I began losing myself to this situation. I WAS a bouncy, vibrant, spur-of-the-moment type of person before I became Zombie Maria.
It has only been in the last month or two that I’ve come back to myself. I’m not there yet. I still shamble a bit, though there are no brain cravings. And unfortunately I still haven’t gottten past the point of wishing the HiQ ill. I really couldn’t actually do anything myself. I’m not that kind of person. But you can damn betcha that I wouldn’t be feeling bad if he were to accidentally get his hands crushed.
10.29.09
Misty Watercolor Memories
The human memory is an odd creature. Or at least mine is. I have been trying to remember incidents from the first four or five weeks after the initial lift and implant insertion surgery. I’ll try to zero in on that time and then my mind will slip sideways as though the memories had a silicone shield. Everything just slides right off. Non-stick memories.
I’m guessing this happens because I tried so hard to repress and not think about what was happening WHILE it was happening. I just dealt with one second at a time, did what I had to do and cried about it afterward. I was on what amounts to auto pilot. Either that or I detached and focused on the anatomical details. Although that really started more after the second surgery.
I wonder how much of this is a coping mechanism. Avoidance used to be a major part of my modus operandi. From what I learned when I was (briefly) a psych major, avoidance isn’t considered a healthy way of coping. Though I’m not so sure I WAS avoiding. I was changing the wet to dry dressings twice daily and going to my regularly scheduled doctor appointments with the HiQ.
I have to wonder how clearly people remember incidents of severe trauma. Does our brain initiate a response that allows us to be protected from the harshness of those memories? Is it some sort of conscious mechanism in which we tell ourselves that “this gets filed back here and we’re not going to remember this any more”. Rather like sticking our fingers in our ears and yelling “LALALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU LALALALALALA!!”
***WARNING – VIVID DESCRIPTION AHEAD***
And then…sometimes I get some vivid memories back. Like one of the times I was pulling off one of the wet to drys and a big chunk of flesh the size of a quarter came away with the necrotic tissue and I felt like Imhotep from “The Mummy”. Or a Zombie.
I actually spent a moment or two trying to put it back in the spot. You know…like when you’re a little kid and you break your favorite toy. You try to put it back together and it won’t go but you just can’t figure out why it won’t go back together.
Yeah, I think I was a little insane for a while.
10.24.09
Debridement
It sounds scary. I was terrified when the HIQ said that at the next appointment he was going to “remove the dead tissue”. I anticipated pain. I even had a panic attack. As if I wasn’t enough of a basket case as it was. I didn’t even get an explanation as to how it would be done.
By this time I was crying at least once a day. It had finally sunken in that things were really bad. I had lost both nipples and areolae. The tissue was completely dead. The tissue itself was blackened and rubbery. In some places it crackled when I pushed down on it. So it had to be removed.
Dead tissue is a breeding ground for infection and if it wasn’t removed, it would have caused infection that would have gone systemic and eventually killed me. So debriding, even though it sounds terrifying, is actually a good thing.
When we came back for the next appointment, the HiQ STILL didn’t explain exactly what would be going on. Thankfully his nurse did. She explained that this wouldn’t hurt because the tissue he would be removing was dead so the nerve endings were dead too. Because the nerves were dead, there wouldn’t be any sensation except for a pulling sensation.
I sat down and kept my eyes closed the entire time. I do know that he cut the tissue off with surgical scissors because I saw the instruments before the procedure. All I felt was pressure and tugging. No pain aside from the emotional grieving of having lost an intimate part of myself. I grieved for the loss the same way an amputee or breast cancer survivor would.
It still freaks me out some that he was cutting tissue off my body. It sounds like something out of a horror movie, doesn’t it? Just the concept was enough to freak me out. Yet through all of this I explained calmly and in clinical terms to Hubby what was going to happen. He was, again, not allowed in. I refused to expose him to it and I was determined that I would do my best to maintain a facade of normalcy.
I failed about half the time by this point. But I tried, by damn. I tried.
The most important thing to take away from this post is that if you have to endure debridment, it is NOT painful. It sounds scary but what’s scarier is what will happen if you do NOT have it done. So have it done and do something really nice for yourself afterward.
10.14.09
Pins And Needles
During the first few weeks after the initial surgery, there is another incident that stands out strongly in my mind. Personally I think that I spent the first 2-3 weeks after the initial surgery in shock. Like the kind of shock they talk about on ER or House, MD. That and the fact that I really don’t want to remember, might have something to do with this.
So why am I doing this if I don’t want to remember? I’ve talked before about how silent people are when it comes to botched plastic surgeries. People need to know and understand that even with an amazing surgeon, things can go wrong. Plastic surgery isn’t an instant fix even when it DOES go right.
So here I am, talking about it.
It was the appointment after the HiQ gave me a cream that was supposed to improve circulation. I left Ken in the waiting room because I was bound and determined that I wasn’t going to expose him to what was going on unless I absolutely had to. Quite honestly I was also terrified that if he saw what was happening to my body, he would leave me and I would be alone because I had insisted on having this done.
I still have a small part of me that blames myself for the entire snafu as regular readers know. Even two years after the fact I carry a part of that blame. I don’t know if I will ever shake the idea that, on some level, this was all my fault.
I remember sitting in the exam chair. The HiQ took a long needle from a steripack and stuck it directly into the blackened nipple tissue on my right breast. It didn’t hurt. I didn’t feel anything. I also didn’t really understand what was going on. The HiQ never said why the needle stick. All he said was “I’m sorry.”
I understand now that the reason for the stick was to see if the necrosis was just topical or if it had affected the underlying tissues as well. If the necrosis was topical, there would have been a droplet of blood from the stick. There wasn’t anything.
I didn’t understand what was going on. I wasn’t being told anything. I didn’t know what questions to ask because of all that. So I was just my usual, kind, cheerful self. It’s amazing what ignorance can do. It’s also amazing how rapidly the old defense mechanism of avoidance popped in. For the last 10 minutes I have been looking at how to create a website on iWeb so that I can finally get the BoobCast website up and running.
That may not seem like avoidance from your perspective. Trust me. It is. I was avoiding talking about what happened at the HiQ’s office that afternoon.
I checked my photos and unfortunately I don’t have anything for the four week span between October 9th and November 11th. I wish I had taken some pics during that time period. That way I could have better chronicled this story.
See? I’m doing it again.
So… Here I go. After the needle stick, I THINK that’s when the HiQ first mentioned debriding. That thought terrified me. I kind of knew that it meant having tissue cut off, and I anticipated a great deal of pain. I’ll talk more about it soon. It’s emotionally really rough but physically there isn’t any pain at all.
He said that he wanted me to start doing wet to dry bandages. He didn’t say why though. I had to figure that out on my own. Wet to dry bandages gently pull off dead or dying tissue. What you do is you take a gauze bandage and pour saline solution on it. Then you squeeze it out so that it is damp and spread it on the area to be debrided Then you put dry gauze over the top so that you don’t get your clothes wet.
I did that all on my own for a week. I forbade Ken from being in the bathroom when I was changing dressings or showering and I ALWAYS wore a surgical bra when I was around him. To my mind, I was not ever going to expose him to that as long as I could help it. Unfortunately, that would come back to haunt me in about a month.
10.09.09
Persistent Situational Depression
April 16th was a very good day. Aside from the morphine I was fortunate enough to get my breasts back. Not the originals, of course. These are the new and improved version. In JumboVision.
Yet it has taken me until today to see even more than a glimpse of my old self. I’ve been going through the motions of living distracting myself with new projects (http://www.fledgelingskeptic.wordpress.com) and just getting through the day-to-day aspects of living.
This afternoon I saw, for just a little while, that adventurous me. This is the part of me that takes unrestrained joy in just throwing a handful of clothes in a bag, getting in the car and driving just to see where we end up. If I had my way I wouldn’t be writing this entry right now. I’d be packing and getting ready to leave for who knows where.
Sadly, I don’t get to have my way. So that’s a bit depressing. This is the first time in years that I’ve seen that side of myself and it has been denied. Hubby would rather make plans for the weekend and stick with those.
While I’m depressed that I’m not going to be able to express that long-buried part of myself, I am so very happy to see that it still exists. I really thought it had long since died off. No more spontaneity. Ever.
I think that I had just gone through so much for so long that I got stuck in a situation-based depressive state. Now, almost six months after reconstruction, I’m finally returning to my old self.
I think it’s probably going to take a little while longer. I still have quite a bit of emotional recovering to do. I’m looking forward to the time that I don’t get sad during the first few weeks of October. I know that time will come. I just have to get to that point.
As people keep telling me, healing takes time. It’s not just the physical body that needs to recover. It’s everything else; the mental and emotional as well. It’s just a matter of time.
08.10.09
Complexus Inferioritus
Today marks a fresh start for the BoobCast blog. It may be occasionally sprinkled with updates on my current status but for the most part I’ll be talking in detail about why I had the initial breast augmentation and lift. I’ll also add much more in-depth detail to what happened to me and why it may have happened.
Today I’m going to talk about the reasons I had the surgery done in the first place.
I was always pretty socially awkward in high school. I was about 20 pounds overweight, only a couple friends, unpopular and an easy target because I had absolutely no self esteem. Add to that, when I went in for a bra fitting, the sales woman told me I had tubular breasts. I had absolutely no idea what that meant and at 16 was too embarrassed to ask.
This is what tubular breasts look like: http://tinyurl.com/mp3cwv
Fast forward 10 years, add breast feeding two kids and gravity and I REALLY hated my breasts. They weren’t pretty. They were just a couple of hanging flaps of skin. Add to that my nipples were so overly sensitive that if my partners tried to stimulate them, I was hanging from the ceiling because it was just too much sensation.
It was about that time that I became determined that by the time I was 40 I would have beautiful breasts. It wasn’t always at the forefront of my mind but the idea sat in the back of my mind and became cemented. Every time I went bra shopping the notion that my breasts were horrible and I needed a boob job became more and more firmly cemented in my mind.
At 39 I became completely obsessed with the idea that I HAD to get something done. I started researching plastic surgeons in the area. It took me about six months before I finally decided on one locally. So I made an appointment for a consultation.
With everything else that had been going on with major family issues , school and the business, I finally went to an appointment in the spring of my 40th year.
After taking a look at my breasts, it was announced that I had degraded as far as I could and it wasn’t going to get any worse. This article explains the Gurley Stages of Breast Regression http://tinyurl.com/2d3ds3 and I was a Gurley Stage II
The doctor used a different scale but I am unable to find it. It basically amounts to how big your areolaes are and how much droop you have. Mine were the size of Coke bottle bottoms and my nipples pointed at the floor. So I was told I would need a breast lift to make them look perkier and an implant to replace the volume I had lost from breast feeding and age.
She put a VHS tape in that explained the anchor lift procedure and left me alone to watch it. Please look here for a diagram and description of a full (anchor) mastopexy: http://tinyurl.com/ku5wy5
I will continue this tomorrow since this post is running long.
08.07.09
Why The Reboot?
I mentioned in yesterday’s blog post that as of Monday I would be starting my story over from the beginning. I’m sure many of you are wondering why. If you go back to my early blog posts you’ll see that although there is a little bit of detail, there are some unanswered questions.
When I first started this blog I was very emotionally unstable. I left out a great deal of detail simply because it was far too painful for me to talk about then. Now that I can think more clearly and have more distance, I can tell my story much better. The more details I can convey, the more benefit this blog has for you, the reader.
I’ll be taking the weekend off. Starting Monday 9/10/09 I’ll start back at the beginning. By the beginning, I mean I’ll talk about the self esteem issues behind the first plastic surgery and the role I feel society and commercialism contributes to low self esteem. In subsequent episodes I’ll also be talking about tuberous breasts and why they are considered a deformity.
To quote Heath Ledger’s character William in “A Knight’s Tale”: Welcome to New World. God save you, if it is right that he should do so.
08.04.09
Progressively Moving Backward
I am incredibly frustrated at how slowly I seem to be healing. Is this my body’s way of saying “Sit down and shut up!”? I had a couple days of higher level activity and last night I ended up taking half a Darvocet because I was spiking a 3-4 on the Oh-My-God-It-Really-Fucking-Hurts o’meter. Today I was a little sore but no big deal so I sorted piles of old mail. Now I’m at about a three again. I feel like I did two weeks out of surgery. I am ready and raring to go but my body itself keeps planting a metaphorical hand in my chest and shoving me back into the chair. I can almost hear some big tough guy from the Bent Nose Brigade telling me “Siddown an Shaddap”.
What’s sad is that in the back of my mind I feel like I’m being lazy. I feel like I should be doing SOMETHING. Yes I understand on a logical level that writing this blog helps people and that’s doing something. With our finances the way they are though and this being our business slow season I feel like I should be doing something to contribute economically to our household.
People tell me, and I’ve passed this advice on to others, my job is to heal. But for how LONG? Someone emailed me a few days ago saying she wants her life back.
So do I sweetie. So do I.
08.01.09
Nick/Tuck 2
I have gotten a couple comments about yesterday’s post regarding Nick Starr’s (http://www.nickstarr.com). Some of them concerning his mental health were very enlightening. The more I think about what I’ve been told, the more I become convinced that supporting Nick is the right thing to do.
Granted I don’t know the full story. I have been told that he was arrested for threatening to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge in June. I was also told that he has threatened suicide on Twitter multiple times. I have not personally witnessed any of this so right now it is all second hand information.
When I was going through the worse of my problems, I called suicide hotline. Even after, when we weren’t sure if we could find a way to pay for my reconstruction surgery, I had a plan in place for how to kill myself. I was so thoroughly convinced that I was nothing more than a mangled, sub-human thing that if I had to wait another three years or more for reconstruction surgery, I was just going to end it because while I was in that head space, my life was already over no matter what my friends, my husband or my family said.
Having been that totally desperate, I understand why Nick feels the way he does. People who have not been in the position of hating their bodies so thoroughly that they just wanted to end it, really cannot fathom why he would go to such extremes measures.
Many of you are probably thinking that his situation is different. He didn’t lose intimate parts of his body to necrosis and an inept surgeon. Very true. But he *does* hate his body for reasons he has explained in his blog.
I *would* like to see him get some counseling though. Surgery is not an instant fix. There is an emotional adjustment period and he’ll probably need some help making that adjustment.
07.31.09
Nick/Tuck
I’ve been following Nick Starr on Twitter and Facebook for a while now. Nick’s story is very inspirational. He lost over 100 pounds the old fashioned way. Simply through exercise and diet. Unfortunately the rapid weight loss has left him with some extra saggy skin. The only way to fix that is through plastic surgery.
Nick found a good plastic surgeon and he as started saving up. Unfortunately he needs about $6500 more for the tummy tuck. Of course insurance won’t cover it. No one will loan him money to have it done and he feels that he is at the end of his rope.
I’ve been at the end of my rope so I understand how he feels. What’s unique about this story is that Nick has come up with an extremely unconventional solution to his problem. He is going to become homeless. He is moving out of his apartment and on to the streets until he saves up enough money for the surgery.
He has a job so he won’t be hungry. He is simply giving up his apartment and other bills in order to save up the money.
If you would like to know more about Nick Starr and donate something towards his procedure, visit his blog here: http://www.nickstarr.com/
Yes, this is extreme. I understand why he’s doing it though and I admire his courage. I’d like to urge you all to support Nick so that he has to spend less time sleeping on the streets.
