It's been a while, but we're baaaaack.  In Stanford Hospital!

Today is D-Day, reconstructive surgery #2.  The last reconstructive procedure lasted 14 hours, basically a surgical Hiroshima.  Today is a "quick" 4 hours of clean up, rejiggering, suctioning, liposucking, correcting, and, most importantly, ENLARGING. The boobs that the plastic surgeon put in last time turned out to be mere teases; she clearly hadn't understood what my goals were.  No matter.  To ensure the Desired results I brought my Sharpie to the hospital today to mark up the spots and make sure there is no confusion this time about the objective here.  Linor is less amused by my Sharpie antics, but she doesn't remember herself as well as I remember, so I'm gonna let her grumble while I do this critical boob-saving work.  I ran into the surgical resident yesterday who said that, "if the flap surgery is like a '100,' [today's] surgery is like a '10'."  Then again, the way they described the flap surgery last time was like a 47, whereas in fact it was more like a 470.  So I'm scaling up that 10 up by 10 (remember that four hours of anesthesia is hard to come out of).  In short, this surgery only feels like an afterthought relative to cancer or a flap surgery.  For those who wonder what the near future will look like, the physical recovery is going to take about three weeks and will consist of wearing various medieval girdles.

What else?  Linor has been on a regimen of Tamoxifen for the past few months.  People ask, "is the cancer gone?"  The answer is that the surgeon took out the tumor, but whether or not the cancer is really gone only time will tell.  It's gone for now, and hopefully forever, but we don't really know.  It's not supposed to come back, and life is technically back to "normal" in many respects.  We even went to Australia for three weeks to visit our dear friends and discovered, to our chagrin, that kangaroos and wombats are really just overgrown rats. Koalas on the other hand...!

But in many other ways the experience of cancer, at least for Linor, is still an open wound, yet much of it is visible and "real" only to her.  There are psychological challenges and physical effects.  For instance, she has a constant tingle in her lower abdomen, no proper sensation in her chest, and even carries weight in her midsection differently.  Her bellybutton, for now, is off from where it was.  It sounds stupid, but imagine your nose had been moved a quarter of an inch.  You'd notice it, and it would drive you batty.  Also, once you've had breast cancer other people who are similarly-diagnosed (and friends of those diagnosed) reach out to you to talk about "it."  So now you're in a club you never really planned to be a member of, can't really leave, and feel compelled to stay in.  Breast cancer becomes part of your self-concept in a way that doesn't really happen when you break your leg or get the measles (let me know of the last time you met a person with a "measles survivor" ribbon).  At any given time Linor has one or two ongoing conversations with other women going through breast cancer, particularly in the early stages post-diagnosis.  Back in the summer she also spoke with various women after she was diagnosed, so being there for others is part of joining the cancer "system."  The "system" even extends to spouses.  Recently I had a colleague reach out to me because his wife was diagnosed.  He's a very senior professor who I rarely have cause to speak to beyond a polite hello, but he saw me in the elevator a few weeks ago and said, "I was told I should talk to you, my wife also has breast cancer."  Why me?  I'm not an oncologist or a plastic surgeon, I barely know the guy.  But once you're in it you get it, like people who have kids get having kids, but people who don't have kids just don't get what it's like to have kids.

So that's the update!  The medical-surgical phase of all this looks like it's winding down.  Today's surgery is set to begin at 2pm, but it's an open question in which time zone.  I'll be sure to post an update with post-surgical results.

We continue to be in awe of all the support we've received from our dear friends and members of our community here and elsewhere.  Shabbat shalom!