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I'm going to have to get someone to help me with a side view. It's very much the same colors as before -- white up front, dark grey on top, brown in back.
And very, very curly. I took this picture the day after the first real hair-cut, and it's grown at least another inch in the past 3 weeks.
Other things have really changed as well.
Part of the purpose behind this blog is so that if my friends or friends of friends have someone dealing with breast cancer, they can at least hear from one other person about it. I don't think I'm typical, but congruent experience can help one feel less alone.
So, it's time to write about how my left breast has changed.
I've always been lop-sided (most women are), and the left breast has always been the larger of the pair. Now, it is more so. The texture of the skin that's grown back after the radiation is slightly different. The scars are barely visible, but they are there. And sometimes I have pain at the surgery point (usually when I've been wearing one of my more "uplifing" bras, as this seems to stretch the internal scar).
The pain is sometimes quite sharp. I'm very glad I was warned about it, or I might mistake it for something else.
The bottom of the breast is quite lumpy. It feels as though hard and heavy things have settled through the mush. Again, I am told this is normal.
More disturbing is the way my skin looks -- it's all puffed and swollen, with little dimples where the pores are -- kind of like chicken skin with the pinfeather points. Every individual cell is swollen. I understand this can take 10 years to clear up. It's disturbing because it looks very, very wrong, not like a breast at all, but some new and non-attractive thing.
In summary: When the tell you that you can "save" your breast, they should perhaps think more about "exchanges."
