geoffrey

geoffrey swept in and sent a wonderful note. those people up in buffalo don’t know what they’d be missing.

writing with geoffrey gave me the chance to identify this sort of odd state after the biopsy and the results. i said before that i had a sort of uneasy feeling of liking all of this surgical attention. now the attention’s gone, for all the best, benign reasons, and i’m in a sort of dull, nether state, tending to wound management and incision healing in the reality that this all was, in fact, not a party. i still would not have preferred any other way aside from the certainty of surgical biopsy, but can this be a sort of ‘buyer’s remorse’? will my left breast heal to normal, ever be the same size again, or has it permantly suffered the casualty of attention? do i care?

waves

today my bruises streak green down my breast. i’ve had a real heaviness under the medial incision in particular and have had more pain than yesterday, though i didn’t take any tylenol or darvocet today (yet…). we cancelled going to thorsten’s birthday party because i thought i should go home instead. was i right! halfway up my drive home on 280, i started feeling sick. once i was turning off on san jose, i was feeling pretty nauseous, which navigating dolores with its ups and downs didn’t help. but the curious thing happened — since i had to drive, i think i also managed circumnavigate getting sick. the saltwater taste in my mouth passed, and then i felt like i was going to make it home and parked and up the stairs, which i did.

so therefore … i’m on the lookout for infection. susan love says if infection occurs, it’s usually one or two weeks after the surgery. my surgery was exactly a week ago. (she also says it’s more a nuisance than anything, and just takes a little antibiotics to clear up, if it occurs). nausea is only one sign, though, and it sounds like i’d have to be red and swollen and feverish too, which i’m not.

we’ll see how i feel tomorrow. perhaps i’m feeling just tired. perhaps i’m sick because of the pain (but the pain doesn’t seem that extreme). perhaps my body is rallying to fight an infection. or maybe it was something i ate! at any rate, dr grissom gave us explicit instructions about how to reach her or her staff, 24 hours a day, so we know what to do.