Today I took the bus to the hospital by myself because Erica wasn't feeling well after our long night last night. I knew my doctor had consultations all day on Friday, so I asked the other doctors in my department if there were any surgeries going on. I was in luck because right at that moment a mastectomy was about to start.
I headed down toward OR to change into scrubs, but I accidentally walked into the MALE'S CHANGING ROOM. How embarrassing is that!?! After I finally got myself settled, I made my way into the operation room. The woman having surgery had a large tumor in her right breast that I got to feel. Even just from feeling on the outside, you could tell how big and rigid it was. The doctors injected two kinds of dyes into her body: a green one and a blue one. Both dyes would travel to the lymph nodes and stain them. The green one would make the lymph nodes fluoresce in an ultrasound and the blue one would actually dye them blue so you could see them when you cut the breast open. The lymph nodes are important because when the cancer starts to mestastasize, it will first travel to the lymph nodes. By finding and removing the lymph node closest to the tumor and then sending it off to the pathology department, the doctors can find out if the lymph nodes had cancerous cells in it. If the lymph node does, then the doctors have to remove all the lymph nodes in the surrounding area (a lymphadenectomy) and if the lymph node doesn't, then they can sew the woman back up after removing the breast. Luckily, the lymph node tested negative.
After this mastectomy, I got to see another one, except this time the woman had already had chemotherapy. (Note- they don't do any chemotherapy or radiotherapy in this hospital except on very rare occasions. They always remove the tumors.) The doctors already knew that this cancer had mestastasized, so they needed to do the lymphadenectomy.
Miscellaneous Thoughts:
- I will never get used to seeing a body part removed and then just thrown into the trash. It is still so weird seeing a breast just sitting there in the bin.
- I would never wish this upon myself of course, but as I watched these mastectomies, I realized that if I ever needed one, it would take a quarter of the time because I'm so small chested.
- I'm not sure if a resident student here is just being really friendly or he's trying to flirt with me. He keeps winking at me except it's always one of those winks that makes him look like he's twitching.
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