Monday, October 24, 2016

Breast Reduction Surgery Experience

Hi everyone! I’m done with my surgery and completely recovered at this point, so I thought I’d start posting about my experience. Here’s what my actual surgery was like. 

The day of surgery, I was super nervous. I’d never been under general anesthesia, and my only other surgery, on my hand, was a pretty traumatic experience. However, this whole experience couldn’t have been more different. 

The worst part was waiting for an hour for the surgeon to arrive. Everyone at the surgery center was ridiculously nice. The anesthesiologist, who called me the day before to ask me some questions, made jokes with me and was really reassuring. He gave me some sort of anxiety medication immediately after putting in the IV and the nurse stroked my arm while I fell asleep. 

When I woke up, the first thing I remember is that I was very, very cold, and kept shivering uncontrollably. I vaguely remember some fuss. When I woke up more fully, I was covered in blankets, even my head, with just my face sticking out. They had also given me some medication to warm me up, which made my mouth very very dry. I found out later that I most likely had a little bit of post-surgical hypothermia, which is not uncommon. Honestly, this was the worst part of the whole experience, and it wasn’t too bad, since they did everything right and got me warmed up fast, and I was still groggy enough that I wasn’t super aware of what was going on.

As soon as I was vaguely conscious, they brought my partner in, and gave him directions for taking care of me. The surgeon briefly stopped by to say it went well and how much they’d removed, and then had to run off to his next surgery.

The nurse who was in charge of me after waking me up was British, and she offered me a cup of tea. I turned it down, even though I normally love tea, at which point she said “Oh, you probably don’t want it. It’s that Lipton stuff. It’s made out of the dust they sweep up off the floor!” 

They gave me a pain medication (I was offered two, but turned the second one down because too much tends to make me dizzy and I wasn’t hurting much at all.)

After about half an hour, the nurses helped me use the restroom and get dressed (I had worn yoga pants and a shirt that buttoned in the front, which were good choices,) and then we were able to head home. It took a while to get home through the weekday San Francisco traffic, but eventually we did and I was able to rest. 


Next time I’ll talk about what my recovery was like!