👍we were pretty under-educated for my diagnosis since I was 8 1/2 months pregnant when I found the tumor and it took a while for my midwives and UCLA to coordinate.

When we finally got rushed through we had 3/4 meetings and appts a day to get to chemo which was a week out.

My husband and I were both thinking just regular mastectomy like my grandma has had in the 1970s, but we took the meeting with the plastic surgeon.

I tested negative for the genes and though the cancer had spread through on the right the left was clear so my team chose a mastectomy that was only on the right, given my young age and the added full course of radiation, Keytruda, and xeloda that was already targeting the cancer.

The plastic surgeon has a chart of life satisfaction post-surgery. Obviously all of us feel great once the cancer is out, but 5, 10, 15 years out people with reconstruction using their own tissue are more satisfied. That argument won me over.

It sounds like you won't have radiation so I'll skip my details about having interm reconstruction (expander/implant).

Actual deip flap surgery was 8 hours with four days in the hospital after, since he had to go in and disconnect/reconnect my blood vessels when transplanting the belly fat. Every hour they would monitor the vessels and a lot of interns stopped by since UCLA is a teaching hospital, lol

Drains were like when I had my mastectomy. The abdominal scar went right over my C-section scar, but way longer. Scar wise the boob looks good.

The one thing I didn't know about was that they started out going in through my bellybutton so now I have this weird looking scar around the slit that used to be my regular bellybutton. For some reason that's the hardest.

Recovery was tough, another 3 months of lifting restrictions, and a lot of bloating. No one tells you it's basically like gastric bypass surgery (at least that's how it felt to me) because I would eat a big meal like I normally do and it was so painful because the food didn't have the space to expand in my belly. The first five or six months I regretted having it done.

Now I am a year and a few months out and I am so glad I had it done. I like not having an implant to worry about, and the radiation shrunk my skin so I am very happy to have some fat between the skin and chest wall. My plastic surgeon did go in and do a lift on the other side to make them match a little more, but the left is bigger than the right which I don't mind.

Hope this helps!