Riding the Wave of Love into Surgery

A couple of days after I received my diagnosis I also received this "note from the Universe" in my inbox:

I think you already feel it, Kristin, but a really HUGE wave of LOVE is coming your way.
Once-in-a-lifetime HUGE.

Hang ten,
    The Universe

It was true, I was beginning to feel it. And as more and more people found out, the wave of love got bigger. And as the surgery date approached, it got bigger yet. And now that the surgery is over and I'm home recovering, the wave of love continues to increase. I am so blessed to have my family and friends that love me, support me, and want to help. If you are reading this, you are probably one of them. So from the bottom of my heart...thank you. You make all of this just a little bit easier. And I think having all of the support and love made the surgery day a little bit easier too.

So, a little bit about the surgery day...
It was a long day. I checked into the hospital at 9:00 am and the surgery wasn't scheduled until 3:00 pm. All I could think about leading up to that day was how hungry I was going to be by the time surgery time came. But hunger only crossed my mind a couple of times. It really wasn't that bad. I was wheeled down to ultrasound at about 11:00 am for a Sentinel Node Injection. I was injected with a radioactive solution that would travel from the injection site (the outer edge of the areola--I know, cringe) to the lymph nodes in my armpit. Then during surgery, the doctors use a Geiger counter (that's what I was told) to find the "sentinel node," the first node that cancer cells would travel to if they have started to spread. After the injection (piece of cake), I was wheeled back to pre-op where I waited for about 3 hours before the doctors started showing up, marking my body with sharpie, and telling me it's "that time." But, "that time" didn't come until about 4:00 pm. I was given my party (surgical) hat to put on, I kissed Greg and my parents, and they wheeled me back. On the way to the operating room the anesthesiologist gave me something to "forget my cares" (he didn't lie) and in the operating room I was asked to move from the gurney to the operating table. I tried to look around the room to get a sense of where I was and what the operating room looked like and the only two things I got were, "this is a really big room" and "everything's blurry" (they had already taken my glasses from me).

My next memory is in Recovery (as it should be). You know you hear those stories about people waking up during surgery, or having out-of-body experiences where they watch their own surgery. As intriguing as an out-of-body experience sounds, I don't think I want it to happen while I'm on the operating table. And it didn't. In recovery everything was still blurry (no glasses yet) and most of my memory is still fuzzy. I only have bits and pieces from recovery and every once in a while another bit pops back in my head and I have to ask somebody, "Did such and such happen while I was in recovery?"

Recovery wasn't pleasant...coming out of unconsciousness, blurry vision, nausea like you can't believe, and people talking about some lemon-sized hematoma on my left side. More sharpie to mark the hematoma, getting wrapped with a compression bandage around my entire middle to compress the hematoma, and did I mention nausea? --ugh. I think Greg was in recovery with me the whole time; I have visions of my parents at the foot of my bed smiling and waving, I remember holding the sickness bag, and nausea, nausea, nausea.

At some point I got wheeled to my room. The surgery took a total of 2 hours. Not sure how long I was in recovery. I was handed the button that dispenses my morphine. "Press it when you need it, but it will only dispense morphine every 8 minutes" was what I was told. I got through the night and my next complete (sort of) memory is the night nurse introducing me to my day nurse the next morning.

The good news of the night that Greg whispered in my ear somewhere in there was that the surgery was a success, the doctor's told my family everything went well, and best of all, the sentinel node biopsy came back negative---ALL CLEAR-- (i.e., the cancer did not spread).

To be continued . . .