Category Archives: Depression

During the first few weeks after the initial surgery, there is another incident that stands out strongly in my mind. Personally I think that I spent the first 2-3 weeks after the initial surgery in shock. Like the kind of shock they talk about on ER or House, MD.  That and the fact that I really don’t want to remember, might have something to do with this.

So why am I doing this if I don’t want to remember? I’ve talked before about how silent people are when it comes to botched plastic surgeries. People need to know and understand that even with an amazing surgeon, things can go wrong. Plastic surgery isn’t an instant fix even when it DOES go right.

So here I am, talking about it.

It was the appointment after the HiQ gave me a cream that was supposed to improve circulation. I left Ken in the waiting room because I was bound and determined that I wasn’t going to expose him to what was going on unless I absolutely had to. Quite honestly I was also terrified that if he saw what was happening to my body, he would leave me and I would be alone because I had insisted on having this done.

I still have a small part of me that blames myself for the entire snafu as regular readers know. Even two years after the fact I carry a part of that blame. I don’t know if I will ever shake the idea that, on some level, this was all my fault.

I remember sitting in the exam chair. The HiQ took a long needle from a steripack and stuck it directly into the blackened nipple tissue on my right breast. It didn’t hurt. I didn’t feel anything. I also didn’t really understand what was going on. The HiQ never said why the needle stick. All he said was “I’m sorry.”

I understand now that the reason for the stick was to see if the necrosis was just topical or if it had affected the underlying tissues as well. If the necrosis was topical, there would have been a droplet of blood from the stick. There wasn’t anything.

I didn’t understand what was going on. I wasn’t being told anything. I didn’t know what questions to ask because of all that. So I was just my usual, kind, cheerful self. It’s amazing what ignorance can do. It’s also amazing how rapidly the old defense mechanism of avoidance popped in. For the last 10 minutes I have been looking at how to create a website on iWeb so that I can finally get the BoobCast website up and running.

That may not seem like avoidance from your perspective. Trust me. It is. I was avoiding talking about what happened at the HiQ’s office that afternoon.

I checked my photos and unfortunately I don’t have anything for the four week span between October 9th and November 11th. I wish I had taken some pics during that time period. That way I could have better chronicled this story.

See? I’m doing it again.

So… Here I go. After the needle stick, I THINK that’s when the HiQ first mentioned debriding. That thought terrified me. I kind of knew that it meant having tissue cut off, and I anticipated a great deal of pain. I’ll talk more about it soon. It’s emotionally really rough but physically there isn’t any pain at all.

He said that he wanted me to start doing wet to dry bandages. He didn’t say why though. I had to figure that out on my own. Wet to dry bandages gently pull off dead or dying tissue. What you do is you take a gauze bandage and pour saline solution on it. Then you squeeze it out so that it is damp and spread it on the area to be debrided Then you put dry gauze over the top so that you don’t get your clothes wet.

I did that all on my own for a week. I forbade Ken from being in the bathroom when I was changing dressings or showering and I ALWAYS wore a surgical bra when I was around him. To my mind, I was not ever going to expose him to that as long as I could help it. Unfortunately, that would come back to haunt me in about a month.