It may not seem like much, but today marks an important transition in my healing. It has been four weeks since my surgery, and the first time since my last surgery (November 19) my breasts don’t feel heavy!  They feel like they are starting to soften up (a hard spot that was there yesterday isn’t there today) and they are no longer feeling like I’m carrying around led.

I may still have a drain (although that too seem to be lessening in its output – I’m hopeful that it might be gone by the end of the week as well). My celebration for today is my lighter noobs … I can wear a tank top comfortably without a bra … yay! My skin between my breasts is still pretty sensitive to touch and pressure (so sports bras and tank tops are more comfortable because they don’t have any zippers or clips in the area between my breasts.

As I mentioned back in the beginning, my process has always been to examine my breasts in when I’m in the shower. I stopped doing that during chemotherapy. Right after surgery, my examinations changed to examine the incisions after every shower before putting on dressings. I’m now back to a point where I can examine my breasts again – except now I feel lots of hard spots which before might have indicated tumors – now the hard spots indicate where the internal grafting was done. With time, the hard spots soften and they begin to feel like normal breasts. I lump won’t mean the same thing anymore – as I no longer have breast tissue – except at the skin or perhaps a little against the chest wall (although they try to scrape that off during the mastectomy as the goal was to leave no breast tissue behind).  Now, I don’t know what a lump will mean – but I know that lumps are a normal part of the healing process at this stage, and I celebrate when the lumps dissolve into soft tissue as that is a sign of healing.