My Beautiful Chaos: Expander Surgery #2

Yesterday I had my surgery. My sweet baby boy is one week old and I spent 8 hours away from him. It was horrible. The anxiety of being away from him was worse than the pain from the surgery... although I've had heavy doses of narcotics to help with the pain and there isn't any drug in the world that could make me feel better about being away from my little guy.

The surgeon was running over an hour late. I was in pre-op, prepped and all ready to go before the surgeon even got there for the surgery scheduled before mine. That was really frustrating because I was sitting there bored stiff doing the math in my head on when I'd be able to go home. They took me in to surgery about an hour and 15 minutes late. I woke up from surgery asking how long I'd been in recovery and how quickly they could move me to post-op. I seriously felt frantic to get out of there. Everything moved pretty quickly. They sent me to post-op and I asked what I needed to do to get out of there and they said I needed to drink something and keep it down and use the restroom. I chugged a bottle of water and went to the bathroom got dressed and was out of there. I was instructed not to lift anything over 10 lbs. Perfect! Zeek only weighs 8 lbs.

Sometimes I start to get really irritated that the only reason I needed to have this surgery is because the first plastic surgeon screwed up. My new plastic surgeon (Dr. Pickart, who I highly recommend) makes it very evident how negligent my first plastic surgeon was. My new expander was only about 1/6 filled. He will slowly fill it over the next few weeks. I go in for a follow up appointment this Friday and hopefully will get the drain removed. I was so disappointed when I found out I needed to have a drain again. Drains are so disgusting and inconvenient.

I've been taking my pain meds every four hours (as prescribed) which is excessive but I'm taking them because I want to hold my boy and this morning I wanted to go to Ephraim's soccer game and I want to be able to sleep. So far the pain from this surgery seems to be just a fraction of what the pain was after the mastectomy. Thank God!

Ezekiel is a perfect, happy and expressive baby. He smiles all the time in his sleep. The entire family adores him.