Next Up...

It has been three weeks since my last chemo treatment, and other than being bald, I feel like a normal, healthy person. My eyebrows and eyelashes have finally started falling out, but at least I made it through chemo without having to paint/glue them on (would I really have done that anyway?). I am looking forward to having hair again, but at this point I don't even remember what it's like to have hair. I look at past pictures of myself and try to remember what it was like to run my fingers through my hair or pull it back into a ponytail, and it seems so unreal to me. It should start growing back sometime in January. Maybe I'll have a quarter of an inch in time for my anniversary on Feb. 1st, and I can wear it in a spiky-do.

My mastectomy surgery is scheduled for December 11th. I'm not so worried about the mastectomy as I am about the reconstruction. My general surgeon told me that he won't be causing me any pain, that it's the plastic surgeon that I have to be afraid of. In these last couple weeks I have actually considered having no reconstruction at all. I mean, why am I doing it anyway? For vanity? For self esteem? These seem like such poor reasons to go through the painful process of reconstruction. Keith doesn't care either way, he just wants me to be happy. I guess it all just seems so overwhelming right now. At times I just want to have the mastectomy, do radiation, and be done with it. But I worry that a couple years down the road I will regret not doing the reconstruction when I had the opportunity. I mean, I can always do reconstruction in the future, but the plastic surgeon said that once my skin has received radiation, it looses its elasticity and won't stretch. So, I'll do the reconstruction now so that I can have the best possible outcome.

At the time of the mastectomy, they will insert skin expanders beneath my chest muscles. A week later, they'll start filling them, and I'll go in once a week for four weeks to have them further expanded. Then I'll have 6 weeks of radiation, then another surgery to remove the expanders and insert the implants. After that, I am hoping that I will be cured! I will also be having one more surgery in the spring to remove my ovaries (to avoid ovarian cancer since I have the BRCA1 mutation). So yes, I am done having kids. It makes me really, really sad to think that I will never have a girl. But I have done a lot of praying about it and I feel that I need to do everything I can to protect my life so that I can raise the children I already have.

I am so grateful for my three little boys. They are so sweet and wonderful. And if I am ever aching for a girl, I can just put one of my wigs on them to imagine what it would be like to have a girl. Jonas and Graham would make such cute girls with their long, dark eyelashes!

I think that having my surgery right before Christmas will actually make it easier. What better time to have it than when everything around us reminds us of our Savior. I know that through him I have been healed and continue to be healed. I know he will be with me during these next couple months just as he has been with me through all the difficult times in my life. Chemo was the hardest of all, but I also look back at it as a sacred period of my life, a time when I was surrounded by angels, a time when I received constant strength, comfort, and healing through my Savior. I love him now more than ever, and have a greater desire to devote my life to him and serve him in any way he asks of me.

The next time I face death, whether it is in 1 year or in 60 years, I want to be able to look back at my life and say that I have lived a good life, that I have done the work God asked me to do, that I have become the person he wanted me to become.