RASHES AND SCARS AND CANCER, OH MY!

I saw this quote the other day, and in keeping with my last blog post (and subsequent discussion) about feeling invisible, I wanted to share. I'm working on getting rid of a few of my little monsters... ***In other news... if you haven't seen Breast Cancer? But Doctor... I Hate Pink! lately, please stop by and visit Ann's wonderful blog. She has written an important post about feeling abandoned; you can find that post here.  ***And in still other news, I am seeing my plastic surgeon, Dr. C., this afternoon to show him my rash. Yes, the RASH... 

It is still...with me, though it comes and goes. 

For a few days at a time, my skin looks pretty normal, but then BAM! the splotches come back. (The photo at right was taken a couple of weeks ago, before it got better, then worse.) Last week, I saw Dr. A., my dermatologist; he told me nothing had grown from the culture he did in December, which means it is a bad case of dermatitis. He then told me he could do a skin graft that would provide my right foob with thicker skin, get rid of my unsightly (my word but I know that's what he was thinking) incision scars and at the same time, abate the rash.

Hold on — I need to call Linda Carter back to the blog to appropriately comment on that suggestion... With all the drama and trauma my right side has been through over the past two years (my bilateral mastectomy "anniversary" was on Feb. 3), including necrosis and delayed healing and tissue expanders and thin skin and implants and now a rash (and not to mention CANCER), the last thing I care about is the fact that I have thick, long, keloid-y scars running across my chest. Seriously? Could it be any more clear that Dr. A. knows very little about my history? He prescribed me another cream (a non-steroidal which also happens to cause skin cancer in mice, and yes he told me that), I then high-tailed it out of there, coincidentally running into my primary care physician, Dr. S., in the elevator. So I took the opportunity to brief him on what was going on. 

Then I got into my car and I cried. And then I put on my big girl pants and pulled out my phone and called my plastic surgeon's office and made an appointment to discuss how to handle this blotchy rash business once and for all.

I never really thought of myself as thin-skinned before breast cancer. These days I prefer the Wonder Woman moniker — complete with amazingly scarred, completely uneven and diabolically dramatic "foobs." 

[EDITED TO ADD: To view more rash photos, see my post from November 2012 here.]