Zero The Advice Dog

I'm the one on the right

Between the lack of interior lighting and feathers covering my eyes, I had a tad bit of trouble in the vision department. As a result, I may have looked a bit like a chicken when trying to follow a conversation.

Chicken problems aside, my mask achieved a high level glory. A level right around best female mask. Which makes it two years in a row for me as well. The best part was that my prize was a spiffy new Kindle Fire! A much tastier prize than last year's scotch.

Of course, all this victory comes with a price: I must continue my reign next year!

There is only one way to remove a boob, and that's with a rusty spoon. Boob replacement, on the other hand, comes in three flavors.

Option one is an expander, in which the surgeon puts a glorified balloon behind the chest muscle. After it has about six weeks to heal, they numb the skin and inject saline until the expander reaches the desired size. Then the expander is replaced with a silicone gel implant. If only one boob is being restored, the other one often receives a small implant to achieve symmetry in the perkiness department.

All breast implants go behind the chest muscles, otherwise they would slip down and result in a belly button boob. There is only so much existing room behind the muscle, which is why the expander is used. However, since an expander starts out small, their is an initial asymmetry. Plus an additional surgery to switch the expander for the permanent implant.

Option two uses a different muscle, the latissimus dorsi. The medically inclined may have noted that this is a back muscle, and most people prefer their boobs on the front. Well, the surgeons don't let that little detail stop them. The muscle is detached at the bottom, swung around to the front, and used to hold an implant in place. This creates a horizontal scar along the bottom of the muscle's usual position on the back. However, it creates an instaboob of the correct size, and the implant is not a temporary one.

The obvious drawback is that you lose use of that muscle. I am assured that people with this type of reconstruction don't miss the muscle, and that the other back muscles compensate for the missing one. Oh, and there's a large scar on the back. Sadly, the muscle is numbed so there is no accidental or purposeful boob flexing.

Finally, option three is a tram flap. There are four vertical muscles in the abdomen. One of these is rolled up and used to create a boob. Like with option two, the muscle is numbed and there is no ability to perform boob flexing. On the other hand, there is an instaboob without the no longitudinal scar on the back. But that's all moot as I do not qualify for this procedure. All the surgeons agree that I don't have enough belly fat to use, plus things would become messy if I were to get pregnant. That leaves me with only two options.

Option one is much less complicated, so there is faster healing. However, it does require a second, though fairly routine, surgery. Not to mention I'd have uneven boobs for a couple of months. Option two is more complicated and has a longer healing period, but the end result tends to feel more like a real boob since it uses more of the patient's own tissue.

Then there are considerations involving the implant itself. Generally, they last for somewhere between ten to twenty years before requiring replacement. The new silicone gel ones feel more correct that the saline ones, plus the gel is cohesive and will not leak out should the implant burst. Choosing the silicone gel over saline was the one easy decision.

After much consideration and discussions with four different surgeons, I have selected option one. Why start with the more invasive procedure, when I have a good shot at getting the desired results without rearranging extra body parts. Should things not work out well, they can always take out the implant and switch to option two with a different implant. On the other hand, once muscle is detached and numbed, it cannot be restored to its former glory.

Compared to choosing the number of boobs to remove, that was an easy decision. I still haven't made a decision on that front, and I very well may end up talking with yet another doctor. I figure if I talk with enough doctors, eventually they will converge on a number. Of course, with my luck, that number will be something like 1.47, which is as useless as it gets.

Way back in the before time, Matt and I visited a Swedish Valhund breeder to get Zero a spiffy new puppy. After I got sick, we waitlisted ourselves for a myriad of obvious reasons. Then, on Friday morning, Matt got an email. A female, long tailed puppy was returned because the couple that took her home were not actually ready for puppy, much less a squeaky one. Would we care to take her home?

It's one thing to say no to a theoretical puppy. It's quite another to say no to an actual puppy shown in actual pictures. In other words, by the time Matt called me at work, the decision was already made for me.

We tossed Zero in the car and drove up to Morro Bay on Saturday. On Sunday morning, we went to the farm to retrieve the puppy currently named Ginny. Pure bred puppies require long fancy names, so she also ignored her full name, Ginevra Weasley.

Ginny, Zero, and a couple of the other dogs got to know each other during a boat ride on the creek that runs through the breeder's farm. The breeder gentle paddled, while pointing out the various sites along the haunted Halloween cruise. My personal favorite was the gnome village, complete with gnome houses and staked gnome vampires. Apparently Zero agreed, as he picked that point to jump in the 28°F water for a closer look.

He instantly regretted that decision and hauled himself out of the water, onto a mostly submerged tree. The breeder was closer, so she scooped him up and deposited him back in the boat. As Zero had no intention of freezing alone, as I was soon equally wet, despite having wrapped him in my now filthy sweatshirt.

Upon our return to dry land, I hung out by the nice, warm fireplace. Zero alternated between cuddling with me and barking at the cat. Ginny happily ran around her exercise pen. And Matt got to discuss important things with the breeder.

The car ride home took forever, but that did give me plenty of time to decide upon her name. Eventually, I chose Rhys, a Welsh name meaning enthusiasm. Matt objected to giving her a male name, despite the fact that he kept using a male pronoun when referring to her. I acquiesced, and she was duly crowned Reese.

The past month has been particularly awful for me, mental health wise. To put it mildly, I haven't exactly been dealing well with my upcoming boob replacement. I lost all desire to write, or even just talk, about what happened. I don't even have much desire to transcribe all the recent fun, but I'm forcing myself to do it. I figure that I'll want to start complaining to the internet soon enough, and without backstory, it won't make sense. So now, without further ado, what went wrong!

Way back in March, Dr. Surgeon scooped out some boob. That piece of boob was then chopped up and dyed and poked and prodded. For simplicity's sake, let's say it was spherical. The entire piece is surrounded by some amount of margin. In a perfect world, the every cell in the margin would be analyzed. Alas, that's not possible, so the guys in lab coats typically take six samples and look at them. Since a sphere does not actually have six sides like a cube does, the sites that are chosen with some degree of randomness. It is that randomness that screwed me.

The sides that were chosen on my scoop came back negative for cancer. Dr. Oncologist postulated that if thirty sides were tested, they would have found at least one that was positive. But they didn't, so the end result was a false negative. The surgery was deemed successful, and I was subjected to chemo.

Prior to starting radiation, it is standard to take before images for a variety of reasons. My images showed very tiny pre-cancerous calcifications. Their size and location indicated that they had been their all along, and that they were so small they escaped being sampled.

After the second lumpectomy, the margins of the scoop were checked. This time, the positive cells did not elude the lab technicians. Unclear margins mean more surgery.

Prior to the second operation, I was informed that regardless of the results, this would be my last lumpectomy. Clear margins would also mean it was my last operation. Unclear margins, well, like I said, it was the last lumpectomy. In other words, I'm now in mastectomy land.

Shockingly, mastectomy land is filled with a gaggle of doctors, otherwise known as those things I'm totally sick of seeing in those buildings I'm sick of visiting. And I promise to tell you all about it next time.

I've been going to various surgeons a lot lately, and I have to admit it has taken a bit of a mental toll. I will  provide details when I stop having nightmares about the horrible pictures I was forced examine. Don't worry; I'll tell you about them in excruciating detail. Emphasis on excruciating.