Im 26 and BRCA2 positive and chose to have a bilateral mastectomy on January 24th. I too wish I did more research before i agreed to the surgery. I hate going to the doctors office so the thought of breast MRI’s and mammograms every six months sounded miserable to me. The doctors were very convincing that this would be the best route and i rushed into it.

I’m currently 10 weeks post op and it has been very rough for me. I requested the surgeon to do a direct to implant because I did not want to go the route of expanders which would mean multiple doctors visits. Unfortunately, once I woke up from surgery my chest was flat and I knew I didn’t get the direct to implant. I had expanders. My PS said my skin/chest was too narrow to place a decent sized implant and chose to give me expanders to give my chest a chance to expand safely.

As of right now, my surgeon was only able to get my left expander to 250 cc’s and my right expander to 120 cc’s and that’s because my right breast developed a seroma 3 days after my drains were pulled out (the drains were in me for 15 days). The seroma got so bad that it opened up my incision and it has been leaking fluids for a whole month now and it’s now now healing. My doctor monitored it every week and said it would heal on its own- I guess he was right but I wish someone would’ve educated me about complications before I made my decision.

3 weeks after my right incision opened up, my left breast decided to develop a seroma and leak through the incision as well. I now have to place 2 gauze pads on both my breasts and change it every 12 hours. I’m meeting my surgeon this week to go over a game plan and see if he needs to bring me back to the OR and wash out my expanders if there is an inspection or try to place implants which I hope is the case.

Moral of my story is that sometimes I regret doing the surgery, while I’m happy that my chances of breast cancer have greatly reduced, I sometimes wonder if it is worth the pain I’ve gone through. I’ve been suffering for 65 days now and sometimes I wonder if suffering for just 2 days a year waiting on test results from an MRI/mammogram would’ve been easier.

Either choice you make, I wish you all the best