This afternoon I was talking to a woman about BoobCast and what I have endured in my journey. What she told me didn’t really surprise me. It saddened me to no end though.

Her mother, a 70-year-old breast cancer survivor with bilateral mastectomy, developed necrosis after her TRAM flap breast reconstruction. Please follow this link (http://bit.ly/17vGa6) to learn more about this type of reconstruction).

My understanding is that even though many surgeons downplay the risk of necrosis, it still happens much more frequently than we are led to believe. The woman in question, we’ll call her Mom, has said that she doesn’t want to undergo any more surgery.

I don’t blame her for that. Especially not at her age. It just saddens me that she will  live with the results of what the necrosis has done to her. Of course she will probably not talk about it and that will be one more woman suffering in silence because she was not given accurate information about the risks of the surgery she was undergoing.

This MAY not be the fault of her plastic surgeon. Sadly, sometimes necrosis occurs through no fault of the surgeon. Mind you the following opinion comes from the Hack in question (HiQ). He said “Sometimes these things just happen and no one knows why”. I need to investigate if that actually holds truth or if it was some kind of sick, twisted cop out.

So this is going to be one more thing I need to add to my To Do list: Research statistics for breast reconstruction and plastic surgery complications. I REALLY think it is much more wide spread than is being reported.

During the trade show I was selling at today I had my first massage since the latissimus flap reconstruction. Granted it was just a 10 minute chair massage but it was still manipulation of muscle tissue by another person.

I kept anticipating pain. Now I was already IN pain in my left shoulder. I was just waiting for screaming stabby pain in my back. Surprisingly it didn’t come. She did go very lightly because she didn’t want to cause harm. I think that I would want a massage therapist with a few years of experience if I were going to have a long massage.

I asked the therapist if she wanted to look at the scar lines so that she would know what she was dealing with. She gave me a look like she had just sucked on a lemon and told me no. She further explained that the latissimus spread from shoulder blade to waist. In hind sight I don’t think she really understood exactly what she was dealing with. I think she thought that my scars were that long…from shoulder blade to waist. They’re not. They really just go from just below the bra strap to about three inches above my waist.

Even though it relaxed my shoulder and eased my back a little bit, I really think that I’m going to seek out a massage therapist that has experience with a post-surgical back patient. That would be my advice to my readers as well. An improperly trained or inexperienced massage therapist could cause harm through ignorance. That’s the last thing anybody needs is more pain.

I learned a valuable lesson tonight. A jacuzzi is an amazing tool for loosening up a knotted back. After a 10 hour drive and booth setup for tomorrows trade show it was the best thing I could have done for myself.

I’ve talked before about why my back feels like there’s a layer pf plastic wrap under my skin. It’s the scar tissue from the removal of the fat, skin and muscle of the latissimus flap reconstruction. It will probably be another 6 months before that has released enough for me to feel normal again.

After today though, I felt like someone had dragged me over a mile of asphalt. The layer of tissue under my skin felt positively raw. So my darling, thoughtful hubby drew us a hot bath in the jacuzzi tub here at the hotel and I soaked for half an hour.

Heat opens up capillaries and draws blood to the surface of the skin. More blood brings more nutrients to the tissues. It also helps muscles to unknot. So this was a wonderful thing. My back no longer feels like there’s a layer of sandpaper between my skin and my muscles.

Sometimes healing sucks but it’s little things like this that make it much more bearable.

When we got into the ER they did the usual. Took my vitals and all that jazz. My blood pressure was, of course, elevated. No fever though, which was a very good thing. Fever marks a systemic infection.

Once they got all the usual stuff out of the way, I undressed and showed the nurse what was going on. This was the first time I had seen a medical professional’s eyes bug out. The nurse didn’t actually SAY anything negative though I could tell she was thinking “HOLY MOTHER OF GOD!!”.

She took a culture of the open area and got me hooked up to an IV. The goal became to prevent systemic infection since I had an open wound the size of a silver dollar. So one of the techs put up a full bag of antibiotic and let it go through the drip.

While that was going, I asked about getting stitched back up. That’s when I got the bad news. Unfortunately when sutures start to go like that, there’s nothing they can do about it. I was told that if they did stitch it back up, it would only tear open again.

Much later I found out that there are different types of stitches. The person who stitched me up apparently didn’t use the type that was for heavy people like myself. Unlike Dr. Elliott’s reconstruction, the HiQ only used a single layer of sutures. That’s probably one of the other reasons I started unraveling.

Sorry folks. I’m just all over the place tonight. I’ll continue this story tomorrow.

I’m taking a break from re-telling my story for a few episodes. Instead, today I’ll be talking about nerve pains.

Perhaps I’m stating the obvious, but that’s my job. With surgery, there will invariably be nerve damage. Some of it can be permanent. What it really seems to come down to is individual recovery.

As we’ve seen, recovery is a very individual process. Some people recover faster, others, more slowly. There are also different aspects to recovery. Today I’ll be discussing my experience with nerve recovery.

Over the last two – three months I have been gaining more sensitivity in areas that had previously been insensate (aka numb). Not all of it has been a pleasant surprise.  Over the last couple weeks I have been broadsided a number of times by nerve pain. In the past, that has consisted of a thin, bright pain as though I were being stabbed by long, thin needles.

Recently though, that pain feels much more broad or thick, covering a wider area. It feels like someone is driving a railroad spike into me.

Why does this happen? When nerve tissue in the peripheral nervous system (PNS) is damaged or severed as in during surgery, it DOES regrow. According to this article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroregeneration) on nerve regeneration, small nerves can regrow at a rate of 2mm per day while larger can grow as much as 5 mm per day.

It is my understanding that the zappy/stabby pain is caused either by nerve damage or nerve regeneration. Or regeneration of a damaged nerve. I don’t have a definite answer. This seems to be as subjective as “recovery”. In the end, it seems only time will tell how much sensitivity my body will have.

Two weeks after the repair surgery I noticed that the stitches on the left side right above the open area were starting to come undone.

No. I’m not kidding. Nor am I exaggerating.  The stitches slowly began to unravel. They called it dehiscence. My research implies that is when the edges of the wound separate. What happened here, however was that the catgut, nylon or whatever it is that compriesed the sitches came apart and became more and more lose until the catgut or nylon was poking out and the edges of the wound was beginning to come apart.

And I thought I was horrified before?? HA! On top of that, I was downright pissed off at the Hack In Question because the fucker was on vacation. AGAIN! Oh and you think THAT’S a trip, try this one on for size: If you are under the care of a plastic surgeon in Florida, no other plastic surgeon will even LOOK at you!!

When the stitches started to loosen I was told that no one could see me at the HiQ’s office because he wasn’t there. So I called around to local plastic surgeons. I actually got into the office of one of the locals only to be told that I couldn’t be seen.

So I went home and the stitches continued to slowly unravel. As they lostened more, the skin pulled against them harder and I began unravelling faster. And STILL the Hack was out of touch. His office couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything for me. So finally when I was about 1/3 of the way undone I went to the emergency room. It was the only place that was left as far as I could tell.

I’ll talk about that adventure tomorrow. Unfortunately I don’t have it in me to do more than short burts.