Next Part of My Journey

I met with a plastic surgeon on Thursday. Dr. Singh came highly recommended from a fellow doctor at Johns Hopkins. He was wonderful. His first comment to me was "What can we do to make you feel better about yourself?" Wow - of course being friends with a fellow doctor helped too. After our discussion I decided that I will be doing a DIEP-flap procedure where my belly fat and tissue is used to reconstruct the breast mounds. In addition, I am going to remove my remaining breast due to the the risk of recurrence (25%). I can not imagine going through this again. The surgery is very long, about 8 hours and involves 3 days in the hospital and up to 6 weeks recovery time. Plus, I will have up to 4 more surgeries to complete the process. These will be on an out patient basis. Dr. Singh does wonderful work, but I will still have a huge hole under my arm where all the lymph nodes were removed. I do not have enough body fat to fill that in too. Before I get calls for volunteers I have to use my own tissue - sorry. We are hoping to have the procedure done in August. The big problem is that Dr. Singh leaves Hopkins next month. He is trying to get permission to perform my operation there, if not I will follow him to his other hospital. I really think he will do a great job and thus it will be worth it.

On a different note, I have enough hair that I am getting my first haircut in almost a year on Tuesday :-)