Drains, Meds and Limitations
I went home with a snug mummy wrap about my ribcage and a drain on each side below my arm pits. I haven’t looked under the mummy wrap at this point and I don’t want to. Baby steps. I’m not ready for that yet. I need to wrap my head around what just happened and get used to everything. There was some confusion about my post surgery instructions so I didn’t actually look at it until my plastic surgeon unwrapped me a week later. I was supposed to unwrap and rewrap it twice a day every day, but the instructions on paper said to do it and the medical assistant who checked on my from his office the next day said not to. So I didn’t.
For 6 weeks I was under strict instructions of no pulling, pushing or lifting. The slightest pressure of “pushing” on anything at all sent a sharp pain in my chest wall. Little things like pressure from brushing my teeth, washing my hands or cutting food. At my follow up appointment my plastic surgeon said it was from the stitches where the expanders are attached to the chest wall and it would eventually ease up.
My breast surgeon told me to stretch every day gently and slowly raising my arms above my head to prevent loss of range of motion. It seemed silly that getting a box of cereal off the top of the refrigerator by myself was an accomplishment.
My plastic surgeon was responsible for my recovery and told me he doesn’t like to prescribe pain meds. He gave me a prescription of 10 but told me to only use them as a last resort and start with half of one. I had no interest in getting addicted to pain meds so I wasn’t disappointed with that. Tylenol and Ibuprofen did the job just fine. I really wasn’t in a lot of pain anyway because the surgery caused a loss of sensation across my breasts so I really didn’t feel too much at all.
I kept my drains for 2 weeks emptying and recording the contents. It wasn’t pleasant, but necessary. At my 2 week appointment my plastic surgeon pulled them out. THAT hurt! I felt SO much better after he took them out. After 48 hours I could shower again and felt like a new person. The drains were definitely the worst part of the whole thing.
Necrosis and Chording
At my first follow up appointment one week out from surgery my doctor mentioned some “bruising” on my left incision that we needed to watch. When I got home I recognized it to be necrosis (tissue dying from lack of blood supply) about the size of a nickel. My next appointment I asked about it and he said it might heal if it was just superficial and not all the way through to the bottom layer of the skin. If it didn’t heal then I was looking at another surgery. He had me keep ointment on it changing it daily. It took a couple months, but it slowly got smaller and smaller until it healed into a pinkish scar.
Another problem I had, even with stretching was chording. It looked and felt like I had a few guitar strings running from my shoulder to the middle of my arm below my elbow. This was really painful and I tried to stretch it out, but it only helped a little. Eventually it went away on its own after a few weeks.
6 weeks feels like it takes a long time to get through, especially when recovery is very gradual, but each day got better. I am NOT a back sleeper, but this was the start of sleeping on my back for the next 10 months until I got the expanders out. I wasn’t instructed to, but sleeping on my side was uncomfortable with the expanders stitched to the muscles so I stayed off of them.
Soon I was past my 6 week recovery and off to a consultation with a radiation oncologist. My breast surgeon, who was my team leader, was on the fence about radiation so she let the radiation oncologist and I make that decision. Radiation and expansion conflict with each other so we needed to know what was next.