What to do...warning, I'm about to ramble on and on.....

Coming out of "mostly lurking" status yet again in hopes you all can help me find some clarity and peace.

I had the first step of reconstruction done a few weeks ago - a stacked DIEP on my mx side. We had planned a prophy mx on my "good" side with bilateral SGAP reconstruction. The problem is that I needed a lot of skin (most of the skin on my mx side was destroyed during radiation - just a mass of scars and broken blood vessels left, much of which was still painful to the touch almost a year later). So I didn't have enough tummy to do DIEP on both sides, and not enough skin with SGAP to repair the cancer side. So while I thought I was going to be "through the worst of it" by now (and feeling safer with other breast gone), we ended up having to split my stage 1 into 2 surgeries. So while still recovering from the first, I scheduled the second yesterday, and was immediately filled with near suffocating dread and doubts.

Here's my thinking..... My odds of a recurrance are much higher than my odds of a new primary in the good breast, right? So I'm thinking, do I really want to spend another 6 weeks feeling lousy, unable to bike and play with my son, spend weeks working my tail off so I'm ahead at work to take the time off, lose pay for at least a couple weeks (since I'm out of sick time), work my tail off trying to catch up after surgery.... What if I recur in December? What will I have spent the last year doing? Enjoying my life and my family and taking some memorable vacations, or getting ready for/in the hopital with/recuperating from more surgery?

The flip side is that the only reason I'm even doing reconstruction right now is because I really want the prophy mx on the other side, and it didn't make sense to go into surgery for that without going ahead and getting reconstruction at the same time. I wish, for the millionth time, I had just done BMX in the first place, and then I wouldn't feel this sense of urgency to get rid of the other one lest it try to kill me, too. I had, in the words of my oncologist, an "extremely, extremely rare" fast growing breast cancer. I went from undetectable to stage 3 in way under a year. People kept telling me I was crazy when I insisted the tumor hadn't been there 7 months earlier when I had done both a clinical and self exam. Everyone insisted, and everything I read stated, that BC grows much slower than that and that it would take years to get a tumor the size of mine and that we just must have missed it. I argued that it was in a very easily detectable spot (thank God!) - no way we both could have missed it (don't even get me started on "if I had only been doing monthly self exams..."). Sadly, it turns out I was right. My oncologist confirmed it a few months ago (would have been good info to have BEFORE the first mx, y'know?) Thus the sense of urgency, and the fear that a primary in the other side might get even further, too far, before we could catch it. Does anyone know if a second primary cancer is usually the same as the first? Or is it usually a totally different beast?

I tried to explain all of this to my DH, who is wonderful and incredibly supportive, but he just didn't get it (shocking, I know...). He felt I was doing the "glass is 1/2 empty" and told me to take a nap - lol!

As I'm writing this, I'm pretty certain I'm cancelling that July surgery. I'll manage being 1/3 done for a while (I'll eventually have to have everything evened up and smoothed out on both the donor site and my chest - that's the last 1/3). I just HAVE to get over my fear of self exams. I know how much better it is to find it early, but the fear I might actually find something keeps me from checking like I should. Stupid, I know, but that's just me being human I guess.

Okay, so if anyone is still with me, thanks for letting me ramble and vent. Maybe this should be on the reconstruction pages, but it seems I just naturally come back to my stage 3 sisters when I'm scared or really upset.

BTW, I've apparently have made progress with the fear thing. I've had this weird feeling in my chest for days, and I've been really concerned I might have a little pneumonia in my right lung. It was literally 2 weeks before it occured to me that I hadn't immediately jumped to "could it be lung mets?". Progress is progress. I'll take it however twisted...