Nipple Reconstruction

I don't know how many of you who were interested bothered to go back to see my later posts on the earlier thread. However this should "catch you up!"

Everything went absolutely fine yesterday -- I could feel nothing when they did the right breast (where the malignancy was) and just a mild buzzing vibration when they did the left (my plastic surgeon and a new resident working with her). Before they started the resident had a needle with local anesthetic and judged how much of it I'd need by whether I could feel it!

I had no idea how I looked since they had placed dressings on them not to be removed for 24 hours. Hubby and I were both dying of curiosity until I unmasked them today! They are just cute little round colored circles at this point, and it is from within them the flap reconstruction will be done. What she does is not really different from what I read and saw photos of on the Net, just the order she does it!

I was just looking again at the photos of me we took the day before the expanders were removed and the permanent prostheses implanted, and then the ones taken yesterday before this tattooing was done. We'll take some again now and then again before the July 23 appointment when she will surgically make flaps to form the nipples.

My sister was dying of curiosity, especially since she was leaving early this morning, heading for another of their traditional jazz festivals in Olympia, Washington. She was lying in wait for me on AIM as soon as I logged on last night and it opened automatically. Below are a couple of websites I located with info for her if anyone else is interested. She felt if she'd been one of the women in those pics she would have been pretty upset at the lack of nipple matching. Of course that's no problem for me, since they WILL match each other, and she agreed it would be better to have both done at the same time. The last one has a picture about 1/3 of the way down with results I'd be quite satisfied with! Once I finally started hitting some of the surgeon's sites they had a lot more on the subject that I hadn't found in the cancer information sources.

http://www.med.umich.edu/surg/breast/recon/afterrecon.htm#nipple

http://www.stevenjsmithmd.com/html/breast_reconstruction.html

http://www.plasticsurgeryct.com/breastreconstruction12.html

I was sure you would understand my waiting to see the results myself before I posted this. Hope it helps others!