My appointment with my surgeon was good. It was over an hour late, and I was ranting about it in my head until I learned why when he arrived. He had been doing plastic surgery on 2 people from LaLoche, where the tragic shootings had happened here a few days ago. He was going above and beyond to help people. He's a good guy. It was a big reminder to me that yes doctors make you wait but yes they are helping people and it might be me next time, so I should be happy and grateful that I get this kind of service and it costs me nothing.
I am happy to say I have the go ahead to exercise again and build up a bit in my upper body. I have to work slow to build up my upper body, but I can run, use the elliptical and other sweaty things, including my core. Just wear a good sports bra and stop if something hurts - makes sense to me. I am also now officially in line for my swap out surgery too, which will likely fall sometime in late April. I am hoping it doesn't fall over the comic expo, since I have plans to head out there with my friends Heather and Lisa and visit my sister, but even if I have surgery right after or before, it's a day thing so I think I can still go and wander a bit. We plan to stay with my sister so I could just stay back home and visit her if I needed to take it easy. We'll see.
I do find it odd though that of all the things covered by my Canadian health insurance through all of this 1 thing is not - fat grafting. They will build me a new breast, add an implant, adjust and lift the other side to match and even build me a nipple if I want but if there are weird dents or lumps in your breast that can be easily fixed by a simple fat grafting procedure you have to pay for that part out of pocket. I have a bit of a dent in my new breast where the thick healthy back skin meets up with the thin irradiated chest skin and fat grafting would make it look perfect, but I will just have to wait and see. Right now it bugs me a bit, but I don't know if it bugs me enough to shell out $1500 to fix it. I suppose I should be grateful that all the rest of this is covered without a problem, but I find it bizarre that fat grafting is not part of reconstruction. "Sure ma'am you can have a new breast - but it probably won't look right - hope that's OK". Sigh. They used to not even cover reconstruction or matching up the other side. Yes it's not like I *need* my breast to get by but why not make it look as good as you can? It already looks so good compared to nothing but a scar so I'm counting my blessings.
My doc says we should just see how things look after the swap out and take it from there. Sometimes people do revisions to get scars right or have nipples added after as a 3rd surgery. That would be when the fat grafting would be done. thing is, I don't really want a nipple - I wish I could do a trade off and ask for fat grafting instead. Too bad it doesn't work that way! I am amused that they have to order in a special smaller implant for the left side they are lifting and adding a bit to to make it match better because they don't stock them regularly. Yep that's me...Tiny Tits McGee.
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