It's a date!

The date is set for my mastectomy: April 19th, 8 AM. I'm having my surgery at the Jupiter hospital. I expect to be there for about two days (the day of and the day after). First my surgeon will remove the breast tissue and perform a sentinel lymph node dissection. He's going to remove the first lymph node (and possibly a few more) closest to the breast, the sentinel or watchdog lymph node, and test it for cancer. If it's clean, he doesn't need to remove any others. The idea of doing this is to reduce the risk for lymphadema. Lymphadema is a pain in the butt side effect where the fluid won't drain out of your arm because the fluid-drainers (the lymph nodes) were removed. It's permanent and painful so we don't want any of that.

Next, the plastic surgeon is going to put in spacers. These will keep my skin stretched out while I'm going through radiation. The skin is very elastic, like a rubber band, so we're going to put in the spacers to keep the shape.

It should take me a few (~3) weeks to heal and I can start my radiation after that. Then when radiation is through I can start reconstruction.