There's a fine line between being honest and complaining, I think, so I wanted to take a quick moment in between posts to clarify what I'm doing here in my SharePosts. I'm not trying to scare you off from having tram-flap reconstructive surgery. The main purpose of my posts here has been to be honest. To tell it like it was. Which was kind of unpleasant.
Not that I'm complaining.
As PJ Hamel wrote a few weeks ago in a comment to one of my posts, keep in mind that my surgery was a double tram-flap -- P.J. had a single and was up and about in a matter of days and weeks. A double tram-flap like mine is different, and yet there are plenty of women who did not have as long and arduous a recovery time as I did.
Not that I'm complaining.
All of which is to say that my story is just that: my story. It may not be your story, so I hope you'll take from it just what you need: information about one woman's experience to add to all the other information you're putting together to figure out which surgery is best for you. I wish I'd had more concrete anecdotal experiential information before I'd made my decision because perhaps if I'd known just how long the recovery could be I might not have been so surprised by it.
Not that I'm complaining.
One of the most frustrating parts about getting cancer or any other disease for that matter is wanting things to go back to normal -- back to the way they were before getting diagnosed with whatever it is we've been diagnosed with. All we want is to get through the experience as quickly as possible and with the least amount of pain and suffering and move on. Already. That's all I wanted and that's why I'm providing as many details as possible about how long it took for things to go back to normal. Which was longer than I expected.
Not that I'm complaining.
I'd be lying if I said things have gone completely back to normal because they haven't. That would be impossible. You can't have breast surgery -- any kind of breast surgery -- and expect things to stay exactly the same because they don't. Experiences -- good and bad -- change us, force us to grow and bring us to completely new places. Which is what happened to me. I'm in that new place. And that's where I'm writing you from.
Not that I'm complaining.
