I Lost My Boob

Remember how we all kind of blamed my gung-ho exercising for that Boob Popping event? Because of that, for the last 32 days I've been pretty good about following rules. Disregarding a slight lawn-mowing slip-up and a couple games of tag, there hasn't been any illegal exercising going on.

Imagine my surprise when I got up to pee at 4:00 this morning and found a hole in my breast. About an inch of the skin had opened and there was our friend the implant. I won't draw the picture again, but it was identical, just a smaller hole. So it turns out that stitches in radiated skin can fail when (a) doing army crawl, jumping jacks, and plank or (b) sleeping on one's back.

Again, in retrospect, the last scab from the stitches had fallen off yesterday and there was a drop of blood in the evening, but I figured I call the doctor in the morning. That turned out to be too late.

Back to 4am: I woke Paul, we called Dr. Baum's emergency line, and he was paged. This time, he said to cover it with gauze and tape and be at his office at 8:00. And he did let me know that, "That's it" for the silicon implant. He'd be removing it and sewing me up with nothing in there. After hanging up the phone, Paul and I could theoretically go back to sleep for a couple hours. (Yeah, right.)

As I've mentioned, I'm totally numb along that seam, so I didn't feel anything when Dr. Baum pulled out the implant. I asked for it as a souvenir, but he has to check with the implant company to see if it's okay or if they take them back. (Recycling implants? I don't think so.)

Then he had to scrape out the alloderm and whatever scar tissue was underneath my skin. That hurt! But he told me that my daughters should be proud of their "One tough Momma" so I gritted my teeth until it was over. Then the best part (note sarcasm): I got a drain! Ah, memories. Stitched up, boobless, and on my way before 9:30. The rest of my day included two Wegmans trips, setting up a Hello Kitty sprinkler, and the girls' dance recital.

So I'm lopsided. It ain't pretty, either. Dr. Baum didn't remove any skin from my D-cup implant and there's a deep seam across the middle. Picture to come after I remove the bandage.

I know this all begs the question: What next? To be honest, I'm sick of this shit. I just hope the seam stays closed without the tension from the implant pulling on the skin, and if it does, I may just go for stuffing my bra or being seriously uneven for the foreseeable future. There are many other options which I'll research eventually. But again, I just want to take the quickest, easiest path out of this breast reconstruction adventure.

To end this post on a smiley note, here's the dance recital video. Maggie is the dancer on the far right in the front row, and Reese is on the far right in the back row. And remember, they're 5 and 4-years-old.