Surgery Complications High Score - May 28, 2026

Hi breasties far and wide!!! It’s me, Dr. FrankenT*ts, again. This is The Double Mastectomy From Hell: Part 2, the much-anticipated sequel to its sister update, “Titless and Witless” from last week.

Sigh. About 14 seconds after I hit send on the last update, I started feeling extremely lightheaded and my pulse skyrocketed. Again, I have a condition that lives somewhere between AFib and POTS, so this isn’t exactly new territory for me, but it felt off. When you live with these things long enough, you can tell the difference. The traveling nurse walked in maybe 5 minutes later as scheduled to check on me. I told her I’m not feeling well and my port is super swollen. So, to calm my nerves, she took one look at it and called 911. Super soothing.

I had mentioned previously that my port did a backflip sometime between the end of chemo and May 15. I didn’t feel it happen and it wasn’t painful, but I did notice it was looking odd. My surgeon, who didn't know that could even happen, put it back in the correct position while she did the rest of the mastectomy, but then needed to lift it again to clear up the internal bleeding situation, then put it back into place. It was painful and not an ideal placement, but it was healing. But somehow, some way, it still tore away from where it was sutured and stitched into my chest AGAIN and decided it wanted to take a tour of my torso and cardiovascular system.

Now, the whole idea of having an ungovernable, free-range port in your body is bad enough. But hearing three very highly trained surgeons say some version of “I didn’t even know this was physically possible” does not inspire a ton of confidence. Usually, the end of the wire of the port is supposed to terminate right at the entrance to your heart so the medication could get beat out with your blood into the rest your body, but whatever party this port was trying to throw ended up making the tail 2–3 inches lower in my heart than it should have been. Which would explain the lightheadedness. Awesome, we figured it out, hooray. The surgical team and I decided to opt for local anesthesia and yanking it right then and there over full anesthesia and waiting several hours for an available operating room.

Being awake for this procedure is not painful, but it’s weird. You feel people digging around in your guts even though that’s not even close to where they are working. Imagine: There I was, laying in this ER bed, with my eyes and fists clenched shut just to stay grounded—I was thinking there were two surgeons working together to get it out and figure out what the hell happened. But then there were footsteps. Lots of them. I managed to unclench my fists and crack my eyes open for a second. How do you think I feel when I see 4 medical students hovering over me looking equal parts fascinated and confused? And I’m me. In my head, I’m like, do I crack a joke? Should I be MCing this somehow? Should I have brought hors d’oeuvres? What do I do with my hands? Did I sign a waiver for this?

By the way, what if I had boobs still? Would I still have a med school learning lesson? I mean, I’ve made my peace about archeologists digging me up in 400 years and going “wow…unfortunate.” And if my dysfunctional meat sack of a body can help a young doctor learn what to do if something unusual like this happens again, and that saves even one person from unnecessary complications or pain, then of course I’m all for it. I’ve just never been closer to being a real game of Operation in my life and I hope to never be again.

The port was pulled out and left no damage in my heart (but it mowed a path you can trace with your fingers into the tissues of my chest). It just needed to be disrespectful and rude for a second and confuse every medical professional in a 5-mile radius as its final act. Honestly, though, it got me through chemo. I don’t need it anymore anyway. I do have the worst veins in recorded human history, so bloodwork is going to be very interesting going forward. There’s also a part of me that’s a little bitter I didn’t get to keep it after! Come on. That would have made a cool Christmas tree ornament at the very least.

After this latest stretch of fun happened, my dad finally said, “Enough is enough,” and came up to Massachusetts. I cannot imagine what hearing all of this secondhand from 250 miles away must have felt like as a parent. And honestly, the timing was good, because the day after the port issue was my birthday. And it was so much fun! I didn’t feel like I was going to pass out the entire day! I was so happy my dad was there and the complications were finally behind me, because literally nothing else could possibly go wrong at that point.

(Everyone knows that means that something else inevitably goes wrong.)

On May 23, I took the compression garments off and felt a sharp sting where my lymph nodes were removed in my armpit. I looked down at my shirt and saw yellow discharge. A section of my stitches got infected…and I know the drill at this point. My dad took me to the hospital. He finally got in on the action, which is something I had ardently tried to avoid for both his sake and mine. But alas, I am the Infection Queen. Remember me being hospitalized for 5 days over a random staph that got out of control infection in January? Yeah. These infections have been a regular issue for me as an adult and I am still so run the f*ck down that it doesn’t take much for them to take hold and become a problem very quickly. With all the other complications I had been dealing with, I genuinely just forgot to mention that my infection risk is absurdly high in general. Like, paper cut? Infection. Stubbed toe? Infection. Strong gust of wind? Infection. My mind was somewhere else entirely the whole week (actually it was in survival mode loudly demanding chocolate covered pretzels and apple soda). I felt very, very dumb for that and I still do.

The followup with my surgeon, Dr. Kalliath (who is a f*cking angel and I will happily die on this hill), was Wednesday the 27th. Let’s just pretend she hadn’t seen me and been dealing with my case nearly every day leading up to it, lol. We both looked at each other and started laughing. What else was there to do? This was an insane ride for everyone involved. She took my drains out and demanded I buy myself a bottle of champagne and take myself on a trip for surviving the worst bout of post-op complications she's seen in her career to date.

Here's an update about the cancer side of things: My imaging and scans looked completely clean, so if there was any cancer left, it was a very very small, even microscopic, amount. As it turns out, there was still just a bit left in my breast and in one of my lymph nodes. That was a bummer, hearing that, but this response is still leagues and leagues better than anyone could have hoped for. It doesn't change anything either. I was going to do radiation whether or not the surgery pathology came back clear. I'm just slightly more worried about distant recurrence now...the odds are still in my favor. I just don't want that knowledge lurking around in the back of my brain constantly making me nuts.

It has been a solid 5 days without some random, debilitating complication making itself known in the most dramatic way possible. I think, logically, I’m past the direct insult of 3 surgeries in a 6 day period and my body SHOULD recover now. Long term, I don’t know what any of these means in terms of more surgical complications or risk for internal bleeding. No one knows what happened or what to make of how ridiculously, insanely, out-of-body-dissociation-level difficult the last few weeks have been. I’m just coming out of this state of constant panic and thinking the stress is going to kill someone I love before anything medical finally kills me. Who did I piss off in a past life? Who made a voodoo doll of me and put it through the air fryer and then the dishwasher, then flushed it down a toilet?

That's the (very lengthy) story of my surgery. Now I'm going to do absolutely nothing for 3 weeks and it's going to be amazing. At the end of those 3 weeks, the radiation ball starts rolling. But until then, my face will be buried into my Switch and I will be eating obscene amounts of mangoes and chocolate chip pancakes, just like God intended me to do.

Sending peace and good weather to you and yours. Stay well and stay tuned for the next installment of this bullsh*t! If nothing else, it does make for an entertaining story...doesn't it.

All my love,

Caroline