My surgery will be taking place in approximately 36 hours. There will be a few things happening that day, which I will discuss in a moment. Before getting into the details of that, I have some fun news to share. It looks like my hair has started to grow back! My head still looks like I have baby duckling fuzz all over it, but there is distinctly more of the fuzz! No real signs yet of colour or texture, but at least it’s on its way. Now on to the slightly less fun stuff…

Tuesday’s surgery consists of multiple procedures: the axillary node dissection, which removes the lymph nodes from my left underarm, and the wire-localized lumpectomy, which removes what remains of the tumour from my left breast. What does “wire-localized” mean, you may ask? Well, that is an excellent question and it probably would have been a good for me to have asked the surgeon when I met with him back on September 28th! I was just so excited to have my surgery date that I neglected to ask an important question or two! Needless to say, I became enlightened when I went to my Pre-Surgery Clinical Assessment two weeks ago.

It turns out that knowing about wire localization is kind of important. What it means is that before the aforementioned surgeries take place, I will have a completely separate procedure where a radiologist will insert a wire into my breast to mark the location of the tumour. This wire will guide the surgeon during the lumpectomy. I have to be awake for the hour-long wire localization procedure. There will be some local freezing, but I’m not exactly thrilled about the “awake” part (as you may have noticed by now, I’m a fainter!), but I will get through it. Once the wire is inserted, I will be ready for the actual surgery which is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. The lumpectomy and the dissection will take about two and half hours to complete. Thankfully, I get to sleep through the rest of this.

Despite the multiple procedures happening on Tuesday, this will still be a day surgery. One of my earlier apprehensions about all of this was the prospect of staying overnight in the hospital. Since Women’s College Hospital is one of the few hospitals that treats these procedures as a day surgery, I will actually sleep in my own bed that night. Knowing this helps, as as I am getting a bit nervous about Tuesday. However, I keep reminding myself that this is the next step to becoming cancer-free. I have to do this. There just isn’t an alternative!