mar9149's Journey with Breast Cancer

My gynecologist ordered mamograms and sonograms every six months for three years. The doctor who read them told me to go back to a regular yearly schedule. I did and ended up having a double mastectomy. I had chosen a surgeon, but my doctor told me I needed a breast specialist and could not use the doctor I had chosen (who actually WAS a breast specialist). He sent me to another surgeon and two weeks later joined her practice (she was a general surgeon, not a breast specialist, but no one told me that). I spent months being treated by other doctors in this large practice for the infections I got every time one of them touched me. When I went to a doctor outside of their practice, they cancelled my nursing service and therefore I could receive no more saline or heparin to keep my pic line open. The port was too infected to use. The plastic surgeon in this practice "reconstructed" my breasts by putting one two inches higher than the other and one far to the right and the other practically under my left arm. I tried another doctor, but he was unable to undo the damage that had been done. Today I have no breasts and no way to wear a prosthesis since they left no "ridge" to keep a bra in place. Wherever I go, I am called "sir". If I had it to do over, I would have preferred no surgery and taking my chances with cancer.

Difficult because the port was infected and I had to leave the practice to go to a wound care specialist. When I told the infectious diesease specialist who had me receiving IV antibiotics twice a day that the new doctor had actually taken a culture and found that the infection was resistant to the medication, he cancelled all my services from the nursing service that came to change my dressings and supplied my saline and heparin.