I went last week to my appointment with a plastic surgeon at Kaiser Santa Clara. He is the only Kaiser doc in the area that can do the tummy tuck/reconstuction type surgury. It is called a free TRAM flap reconstruction.
Warning! Gross details ahead!
http://www.mayoclinic.org/breast-cancer/tramsurgery.html
So the doc says I am a good candidate for this type of reconstruction. This is where they take my flabby belly and divide it in two and make two breasts out of it. Then they pull down the area above the belly button and streatch it down flat, making a new hole for the belly button, and sew it all up. It take 12 to 14 hours on the operating table for 2 surgeons (him and one of his collegues) and will take at least 5 days in the hospital with the first day in ICU. It will take between 1,000 and 1,200 stitches to sew everything up. The good part is that since it is my own tissue there is no chance of rejection and very little complications down the road. The bad part is that it is MAJOR surgury and that it requires that the doc find an acceptable artery and vein in the chest area and microstitch the flesh in carefully. The ICU nurses will be in every 15 minutes with a ultrasound device to check blood flow in the area. The reason is that there is a small chance of the tissue dying if the doc didn’t attach it right to the blood vessels. If the tissue dies it will be more surgery to remove the dead tissue and further reconstruction put on hold for a while. The good news is that since I have lost so much weight in the last 2 years that there is enough flabby belly for this to work (that is good news, right?). It will be a B cup at the most, could be as small as an A cup, but it will be all me. No implants to harden, rupture or any of those things. And a nice flat belly for the first time since I was pregnant with my 16 year old. That would be 1990. Unfortunately this doctor is booked out for 6 months. So this will happen sometime in 2007. He said that if I lose more weight, which would be nice, he will have more of my flabby belly to harvest and I will be more likely to get a B cup.
Probably more details than most wanted to know, but some may find interesting.
