holidays

Holidays are hard when you're not waffling in this weird state of mixed gratitude and frustration, when everyone is getting along and healthy and happy, when there is enough money and time to buy and make all the gifts you'd really like to give, when the weather does what it ought to do and sets the mood for the season. When any of those things are out of whack, it gets hard to find the spirit for christmas. It just didn't feel like it was ever actually going to happen, but it happened and in spite of my lack of christmas enthusiasm, it was nice to spend time with family and friends visiting from their far-flung homes. Sitting around a table last night I laughed more and harder than I have in weeks, maybe months. Thank you for that, friends.

Today I spent a substantial part of my evening looking up plastic surgeons. I am doing the slow, strange, mental work of giving myself over to the reality of my reconstructive option - an implant. Three months ago I hated the idea. Now I'm looking at surgeons' portfolios, assessing their skill, checking their credentials, and doing it all without crying or feeling sorry for myself. That's a big deal. In a way, to accept that an implant is what is available to me (given that I opt to have reconstructive surgery instead of wearing a prosthesis every day) is to accept what happened in September. I've struggled to accept that that tissue transplant failed inexplicably, as in rare cases they do. But to really take that in, to swallow it up and make it part of me, I have to acknowledge that it is unsafe, ill-advised, and unpredictable to think of reconstructing my breast with my own tissue again, which means that my plans for achieving normality post-cancer are shot to shit. It also makes my body feel unreliable which is pretty much the last thing I wanted to feel while fighting the mutation of my very own cells that could have killed me. Implants don't last that long and so will need to replaced at least once and likely more than once, which means that breast surgery is set to be a part of my life for good and I'm not crazy about that plan. So it goes.

I finish chemo on January 30th. A month after that I'll be cleared to start reconstruction which begins by having a balloon-like sack inserted under the muscle on the chest wall. Once that incision has had a month to heal, I'll go in for weekly-bi-weekly saline injections to fill up the tissue expander and stretch the breast mound which will probably take about six weeks. Once the skin and tissue have been stretched to the appropriate size, it'll be given a few weeks to settle at which point I'll go in to have the expander removed and replaced with a regular implant. From everything I've read, it seems like it could be a three to five month process just to get the implant in place, which is hopefully but not necessarily the end of the reconstructive surgery. It's a short time in the long-term, though that's sometimes hard to remember when the end looks this far away.

Tomorrow is new year's eve. I've never been so ready to say good bye to a particular year.