The Surgery Part II

I was tired as I sat in the waiting room.  Sad.  Filled with dread.  But not at all thinking of walking out, or even wanting to.  It had to be done. 

***

They called me back and gave Bryan, Helen and David each a hug, not knowing that they'd be permitted back to see me soon.

The first stop was the pre-pre-op room.  Blood pressure.  Temperature.  They asked for my weight, which I assumed would affect the anesthesiologist's work, so I didn't lie. 

***

The creepy part of the pre-op room is that it is full of bays, separated by curtains hanging from the ceiling. One bed per bay, each bed with a person in it and we were all there for one reason:  someone was going to cut us open soon. 

By the nurse's station hung a giant white board with the day's line-up of surgeries. 
There I was:  Ponce - Mayfield - mastectomy.
I hate that word.

And they left of "sub-clavian port installation," we were doing that, too.  All in one shot.

***

I've since been asked by medical people why we were not removing the left breast as well.  It's fairly standard procedure to take both when it's this type of cancer in a woman so young. 

Believe me: it is not as though I had any plans to hang on to my other one.  I could see the medical road stretch out before me in the best case scenario--conquer this cancer, and then do a mammogram every year for the next 50 years with the hope that nothing shows up?  Whatever.

The answer is that this was not to be a simple breast removal.
This was to be a radical removal. 

Like back in the old days when surgeons didn't catch the cancer early, and didn't know much about margins and wanted to be on the safe side.  They'd carve out the whole pectoralis--the muscle below the breast--too.

That would be enough trauma for one body.  The other breast could wait.

***

In my case, we weren't being "old school."  The MRI showed the cancer already in the muscle wall. 

My oncologist, whom we'd been to see right after the first surgical consult with Mayfield, pleaded with me not to do this surgery.

It was on my cell phone.  We were driving South on Powers when he called, and he was emphatic.

"I'm looking at the pathology report and we have an excellent medicine for this particular cancer.  We can shrink it back from the muscle.  One of my colleagues was just telling me that she hasn't even seen a radical mastectomy in the last ten years, they're so uncommon.  Don't do this.   It's a morbid, morbid surgery and you don't need to do this."

So why was I sitting in the pre-op bay, ready to do this?  Long story.  For a different post.

Suffice it to say: I was going to do this.

***

I dressed in a hospital gown.  All my personal items in a bag.  (Another heavy-duty plastic one with handles. Nice.)

Bryan came back to join me.  Helen and her service dog, too.  I was crying.  A weepy sort of cry.  A my-heart-is-being-pressed-through-a-grist-mill.

I don't think I knew this about faith before that moment.  That even 100% faith cannot protect you from grief. 

I kept thinking of Jesus in the Garden before one of His friends betray Him, before the rest deserted Him, as He thought of the torture about to befall Him.  He knew grief. 

***

Mayfield appeared, Helen and the dog left.

He did something I never thought I would experience from another human being. 
He signed my breast.

"Weird, I know," he said.  "It's a requirement.  You wouldn't believe how many things can go wrong if we don't take the most basic precautions."

Fine.  It's just that I expected to look up and see a NASCAR track in front of me.

***

Mayfield asked if we wanted to pray.

Bryan did the speaking.

I did the crying as I watched Mayfield, sitting down my be feet, his head bowed to the bed, his arms outstretched.  A humble man.

***

The surgical nurse came by after he left. 

She told me Mayfield had briefed her on the surgery.  She told me he had teared up telling her how important it was that "we get this one right."  She told me that Mayfield was her "favorite person in the whole hospital." 

***

Then the anesthetist came and I don't even remember what we were talking about before I suddenly felt very relaxed.  And then suddenly woke up with an oxygen mask on my face and my throat so, so, so dry.

I heard Mayfield's voice, close to my ear, "How are you doing, Amy?"

I groaned.

He said, "Don't worry, I got the license plate of the truck that hit you."

Seconds later, I was more awake, and you know what was really hurting me?  My ankle.

He confirmed this later, that I had indeed issued, as my first complaint, "My ankle hurts."

It felt exactly like the times when I sit cross-legged and the plate on my ankle is resting on the ground.  As soon as I move, that little area burns.  It was that pain.  Exactly.

By the time I was wheeled to the recovery room, it was my neck that hurt.  I sleep with a cervical support pillow and now cannot sleep without it.  Yet I'd just spent 7 hours in a bed without one.

***

I learned things soon, as I sat up just a bit in my hospital room.

The port installation had not gone well.  A port is a small chunk of titanium with a soft "belly" that is inserted into the body.  It has a plastic tube that goes from below the "belly" of the chunk out into the body.  The tube is threaded into one of my blood vessels and the body--amazingly--doesn't bleed around this tube, it just kind of. . .seals up around it quickly.

When the time for chemotherapy arrived, I did not roll up my sleeves and take intravenous needles.  I pulled down my shirt collar and the nurse poked a needle through my shoulder, into the "belly" of the port. 

This is easier on one's arm vessels. 

But I didn't get one that day.  Mayfield couldn't get the tube to thread into the vessel.

And in his efforts, he thought he may have poked too far with the tube and collapsed my left lung. 

At which point he said, "That it, sew up this side.  We're here to cure cancer," and he moved to the more pressing task at hand. 

***

(Turns out the lung wasn't collapsed.  Didn't feel like it, anyway.  But he inserted a chest catheter anyway--which hurt--and ordered me into an ICU room which was, therefore, private and under the watch of a nurse devoted to my care.  So that was nice.)

***

Something else happened in the surgery.

After he removed my breast, he prepared to carve into the muscle, but noticed that. . .it seemed to be healthy tissue. 

He sent a tiny slice off to pathology and heard back that there was no cancer there. 

So I'm not caved in, as I'd expected to be. 

What of the discrepancy between the MRI images that showed a glowing chest wall and the actual health of that tissue?  There's no medical explanation.

***

Something else happened in the surgery.

As I've noted before, scans also showed my lymph nodes on the upper right side aglow and full of cancer.  He removed all those in my armpit that he could get to.

But, as he'd told us earlier, the one cancerous node that was higher up in the shoulder, "surgery cannot address."  It would still be in my body even after a surgery as radical as this.

I'm going to quote him:

"Right before sewing up, I thought, 'I wonder if I could get to that,' so I stuck my hand up under your collar bone and was able to pluck it out?'"

"Pluck it out?"

"Kind of like a grape."

"But you said you wouldn't be able to get to it. . ."

"I've got to give glory to God for that one, Amy.  This is not something that's supposed to happen." 

***
During this whole time, updates came out to Bryan and Helen and David.  I asked Bryan what they did as they waited and he didn't know.

He really didn't know. 

He said he thought they ate lunch at some point in the hospital, they must have. 

This is just weeks afterwards that I asked him, not yesterday, 2 1/2 years later. . .  I was--am!--very touched that he had no idea.

***

But he did call Mom with updates.  She called my family.  Sister #1 sent out e-mails.  My friend Laurie picked up the torch post-surgery and all through that ICU weekend and gave a play-by-play. 

I didn't know all that was going on.  But it was a beautiful, beautiful thing to learn about when I got home a few days later. 

That's the thing to know, really, when you are the one trying to be helpful for someone else who is walking a valley. 

You feel helpless.  You feel like an e-mail, or a card, or a phone call, or a prayer, or a blog-page-view couldn't possibly help at all.


And yet all those little things are thunderous voices in the valley shouting:

You are not alone. 
We are in your corner.

They are the wind one spreads her wings upon.

***

(And, hey, "In your corner" belongs on our List of boxing phrases. . . )