I thought I would post a quick update on my wife. Partially because it’s been a while, and partially because of a little adventure yesterday.
For the past few weeks, my wife has been getting her “expanders” inflated preparatory to having her final breast prosthetic inserted in April. This is a slow process in which we visit the plastic surgeon’s office each week and they inject 60ccs of saline solution into each breast. For reference, 60 cubic centimeters is about a quarter-cup (volume, not cup-size). The idea is to gradually stretch the skin and - much more importantly - the blood vessels so that when the actual prosthetics are installed, her skin will stay healthy.
It’s been a relatively fun experience for us - she takes a muscle-relaxant before each appointment, which means I take a half-day off work to drive her there and back. Sometimes we grab lunch afterwards. “Fake-boobie dates,” we call them. But not in public. Except here, I guess. The “expander” implants are not shaped to look like real breasts, so they basically look like hemispheres just below her skin. And since the plastic surgeons has to “over-expand” the skin, my wife is now at a point where she is larger than she will be with the final implants. At this point they’re the size of half-coconuts and she looks utterly ridiculous… like a poorly-manufactured Barbie doll or the fakest-looking porn starlett you’ve ever seen.
But overall, that part of the recovery is going well. Ms. Wisdom is back at work and doing fine. She’s started her hormone treatment and none of the terrible side-effects have come to pass. So it’s all pretty good.
HOWEVER… Sunday night, her lung collapsed once again.
We weren’t really sure if that was what happened at first. When she complained about shortness of breath, I ran upstairs and grabbed the blood-oxygen sensor that Jpiniard suggested we buy upthread (post #670), and it said that she was at 97%… far from a low level. We talked about going in to the ER, but we weren’t really sure that it was a collapse and our previous experience in the hospital (a stay of neigh on two weeks) was so terrible that my wife was in tears even considering it. We elected to sleep on it.
The next morning, I ran out in the snow and bought a cheap stethoscope, and that pretty much confirmed our amateur diagnosis. I had woken her up a couple times in the night to use the sensor (thanks again Jpiniard!) and each time she was in the upper 90s, as she was the next day, so we weren’t truly worried, but… hey it was a collapsed lung! That’s the kind of thing you go to the ER for, you know?
So Ms. Wisdom showered and shaved her legs and carefully packed for about a week with all her toiletries and whatnot. Then we set out for the ER.
This time, we decided NOT to go to the hospital five minutes from our house. The last experience was terrible; they botched a couple procedures; and honestly I haven’t ruled out suing them… the only reason I haven’t yet is that my wife’s surgery for the implants is going to be held there and I am a bit wary of suing people who are about to cut my wife open.
Instead, we drove about 45 minutes away to Fairfax Hospital, which has the only pulmonary department in the area and have a couple thoracic surgeons on-staff.
All the way, driving through the snow, I was psyching myself up to fight with the ER doctors: this time I didn’t want an ER doctor to do the surgery that inserted the suction tube; I wanted a “proper” thoracic surgeon to do the job and I was willing to threaten and cajole and demand to see hospital administrators or whatever to make sure that happened. I’m a big guy with (slightly) more muscles than flab, and I was prepared to intimidate if necessary.
Not necessary. The ER doctors called in their pulmonologists immediately and we ended up getting seen by the head of the thoracic surgery department. He asked a bunch of questions, including what happened over at the other hospital. There was a lot of head-shaking and eye rolling. “It’s like you were in some third-world country!” he exclaimed at one point.
Anyway, he went over three options for us, but the one that he recommended was to go home and call him in a week. Yeah.
See, it turns out that in healthy people, collapsed lungs tend to heal on their own, and if you’ve ever had a collapsed lung the chances of it recurring are pretty good… like 60%. My wife’s X-ray showed that it was about a third of the way collapsed. He checked her blood-oxygen levels, saw that it was still in the 90s, and said that unless she was at high risk of losing the other one, that was not dangerous at all. His recommendation was to go home, return to work, continue a “regular” level of activity - including going to the gym - and have another X-ray done in a week. If there had been no improvement, then we’d talk about surgery or chest-tubes at that time.
So, somewhat bewildered, we got back in the car and drove home through the freezing rain, and Ms. Wisdom unpacked all of her bags. Overall, it was a pretty pleasant experience. And I’m now more certain than ever that I need to call a lawyer about our previous visit.
