OK, because of the leaky expander, they moved up Ms. Wisdom’s prosthetic surgery. It was supposed to be mid-April, but they moved some folks around and got us in last Friday (Good Friday).
On Pink Attire
So obviously, this whole thing has taught me a great deal about breast cancer, and especially the politics around it. Believe it or not, all the money that the Koman Foundation and similar groups bring in associated with making NFL teams wear pink or the various events set up at high schools actually do a great deal for women suffering or recovering from these types of cancer. The support and… I guess I could call them “perks”… are pretty impressive and probably folks like Tom didn’t see a similar support structure for other types of cancer.
One of the biggest things that the Koman-like groups did was to force Congress into passing a law that says that insurance companies MUST pay for reconstructive surgery related to breast cancer. That was back in the Clinton presidency, and it’s worth noting that a couple of the bills that attempted to kill Obamacare ALSO had clauses that stripped out this provision. The insurance companies REALLY hate that they have to pay for this, as it’s not strictly medically necessary.
Tough tacos, I say.
Gummi-Boobs
The new generation of breast implants are semi-solid. Instead of being kind of round bags of silicon or saline that we’ve all seen demonstrated in various high-quality movies over the years, the new ones are made of silicon gel, and are about the consistency of gummi-bears. They are also shaped to fill in (or fill out) the missing tissue.
Ms. Wisdom has always been a B-cup, and not even a full one. She has typically worn a padded bra to make herself a little curvier. She liked how she looked just after our kids were born and she was breast-feeding, but even then she kind of daydreamed about being a C-cup. I am not the greatest husband on the planet, but this is one area where I have never failed: whenever she would make a comment like that, my response has always been a look of mild surprise and a statement something along the lines of “Really? I suppose that would be fine, but your figure is incredible right now…” Cheesy? Sure. But I’m still married to a woman who could have done FAR better than me.
But anyway, she now getting “free” plastic surgery, so she decided to upgrade to a C-cup. I - obviously - support such a decision.
Liposuction
A few weeks before, the plastic surgeon mentioned that because of all the breast tissue that was removed in the mastectomy, there would be “hollow” spots that the prosthetics wouldn’t fill in. To soften these “divots”, the surgeon would remove some fat cells from my wife’s waist and inject that fat into the hollows.
Now obviously, this is kind of exciting, right? Not only is Ms. Wisdom getting bigger boobs, but also at least a partial liposuction.
So we’re in for our pre-op interview a couple days before, and my wife is trying to figure out what the extent of the liposuction is going to be. She’s a woman who is in great shape but she’s also had two kids and she’s 46 so there’s some flab around the middle that no amount of time in the gym is going to get rid of. On the drive to the surgeon’s office, she sounded me out about maybe paying for a “full” liposuction while the surgeon has her on the table anyway.
Like I’m going to refuse her something like that.
So we sounded the assistant doctor out about it. Hey, you’ve got the surgery suite booked, they’re doing some liposuction anyway, how much extra would it cost to just do the whole megillah? The assistant kind of hems and haws and suggests that maybe a different procedure might be better and even cost less, but says that she’ll check with the pricing person and ask the surgeon.
A couple minutes later, the surgeon comes in, gives my wife an up-and-down glance, and asks her to lie back for an examination. A few minutes of prodding her belly and squeezing around her belly-button follow.
She then pretty much announces that most of of what my wife thinks is belly-fat is actually just flabby muscle. In order to fill in the divots in the breasts, she’ll pretty much have to take 90% of the actual fat out of the belly anyway, so our question is moot. Quit bothering her assistant about stuff like that.
Now… I am not entirely sure what happened there. With most other doctors, I would have probably concluded that the surgeon was kind of winking at us and basically providing a little extra pro-bono plastic surgery. But this particular surgeon doesn’t seem to be all that subtle… I’m sort of inclined to take her at her word.
Another Surgery
Having my wife go under general anesthetic is becoming disturbingly routine. But it was pretty routine. Over in a couple hours; a few more hours in Recovery; then I drove her home.
This is all soft-tissue work, and basically the primary goal after such surgery is near-constant pressure on the affected area to prevent bruising and swelling. So Ms. Wisdom was wrapped in bandages and then stuffed into a compression jacket and a massive girdle-like contraption.
The weekend passed fairly uneventfully. The liposuction was the painful part, apparently. They basically ripped a layer of flesh out between my wife’s abs and the skin, so she has a hard time doing anything that involves the abdominal muscles, like… sitting, walking, breathing, eating, or talking.
I got to be nursemaid again, which I find to be a lot of fun. Mostly, that involved a lot of sitting around next to her and reading a book, whereas on most weekends like that I would be doing yardwork. Every once in a while I get to help her to the bathroom and get her a drink of water. Tough life.
You Can’t Be Too Busty or Too Thin
Monday we went to the plastic surgeon’s for the Grand Unveiling. They took off all the wraps and the dressing and Ms. Wisdom got to see her new body… which turned out to be kind of jaundiced yellow with lots of angry purple bruises and some unsightly swelling in odd places.
Basically, my wife was disappointed. Her stomach didn’t look any flatter, she’s lumpy, and she thinks her boobs are weird-looking.
Now of course she’s being silly. Her stomach appears to be unchanged because it’s still swollen and angry from the surgery. It will only get better from here. She’s lumpy because (as they explained) about 50% of the fat that they transplant from the belly to the breasts will just be metabolized by the body before new blood vessels can be created to sustain the tissue. So, the plastic surgeons “over-fill” the divots with twice as much fat. This too shall pass.
The only thing left is her new breasts, which she’s kind of having second thoughts about. I don’t hold myself up to be any kind of expert, but my amateur observations of the female torso have been fairly extensive over nearly a half-century’s worth of constant study. And I think the new ones look great. I think my wife was expecting her previous “shape” to just be scaled up, but that’s not what she actually asked for - she said that she wanted the cleavage and fullness that she never had before. And that’s what they gave her. She’s just not used to it.
I offered to illustrate that her new breasts were not unusual by showing her some short instructional videos I found on the Internet, but - once again - she declined. Ah well.
Anyway, that’s where we are. Hopefully that was the last surgery. Ms. Wisdom will probably be out of work for another couple of weeks while she heals, but we’re planning on going down to Wilmington, NC on Friday: my daughter will be playing her first D1 tournament this weekend, and we’re going to be staying at a cute little B&B in the historic downtown area. Hopefully she’ll be recovered enough that the long drive won’t hurt her too badly.
Honestly, I need to shift into high gear here regarding my OWN health. The last four months or so I’ve been so focused on driving around and being a care-giver that I haven’t been doing the bike-commute as often as I should, I haven’t been eating as well as I ought to, and I’ve gained about ten pounds.
Now the summer is almost here and I’m pastier and pudgier than I ought to be at this time of year. And I find myself with a busty, thin wife who is swearing that after this cancer scare, she wants to get outdoors and carpe some diem. I gotta up my game.
