Post Op Notes

There is not much to say. To be honest, I am in no shape to say anything, because I am taking pain medication following my lumpectomy surgery, and writing is difficult to impossible when taking pain meds.

The surgery went well, and when my surgeon gets the lab reports back, she’ll know if she got good margins. She thinks she did. “Good margins” means she got all the cancer, plus a bit more tissue surrounding it. Just making sure.

The surgery itself was a snap, for me, at least. I slept through it and woke up feeling great.

The placement of the wires beforehand to indicate where the tumor was – not a snap. Enough said.

The next step, assuming the margins were good, is radiation therapy.

The women who have been through radiation therapy tell me that it burns you, and one survivor has passed me a jar of a cream especially designed to soothe radiated skin. The brand name is “My Girls.”

Well, duh, did I expect breast cancer to be fun?

One thing has become clear to me. All my life, when I heard someone had cancer, I thought of them from that point on as that poor person with cancer. Now I am one of those people, and I realize that I am, that we are, not defined by our cancer. We are the people we have always been, and we have received a crappy diagnosis. We are not a diagnosis walking around in a person who has become secondary to a disease.

Cancer does not define us. It is not who we are. Good thing to know.

I’d write more, but my latest pain pill has kicked in, and my brain has hung up the closed sign.

This has always been my problem with the opiate painkillers. I miss myself. But I am told that I will heal faster if I am not in pain. So I’ll stop trying to write and go continue watching “The Good Place” on Netflix. While playing a bubble breaking game on my phone. Because that’s how I’m rolling this week.

Blessings to all, and grace and peace, from the land of fuzzy thinking.