*Welcome to the most difficult part of my story. I start off with some basic educational information but if you get to the end you will see where the surgery story begins and I am just getting started.
Yesterday I left you with the moments before I went into surgery. This was not your everyday double mastectomy. This was a Double Mastectomy with immediate DIEP FLAP reconstruction. The duration of this surgery would take over 13 hours to complete. First my oncological breast surgeon would do the double mastectomy. With that I had all breast tissue removed. I was basically left with the layer of skin that once held my breast tissue. I also had 6 axillary sentinel lymph nodes removed which is standard in this type of surgery. Everything was sent off to pathology to first see if everything bit of cancer was gone and to see if my lymph nodes had any sign of cancer cells. The results of this would determine future treatment.
The good news was that about 95% of my cancer was completely gone. The remaining amount of cancer that remained was contained to a milk duct which meant all of my "invasive" cancer was reported to be gone and my "non-invasive" responded to the chemo.
This was really great news.
I have now gone down a rabbit trail while writing this post as I am now knee deep in my chart reading all of my records and dissecting every word written.
I have now requested a complete release of my records because surprisingly all of my notes for my surgery minus pathology results are missing from my chart.
I want to read every single detail. I want to know what happened during those 13 hours. I do recall reading these notes a few years back and am now really puzzled as to why they are buried deep into the archives. I will keep ya'll posted on if I do recover those records.
Information and data is really important when it comes to being your best advocate. Read the charts, study the results and ask the questions. That has always been my mode of operation. Don't be afraid to look into things and do your research! It all matters!
More to this story tomorrow and .. I can guarantee.. this story of mine is going to go well past October! I'm really just getting started.
Thank you to all who have been following along and reading. It is really of great encouragement to me and I really appreciate it more than you know! 
This part of my story is probably the most traumatic part to relive to tell to you. I will break it up into several days so get ready. I am really pouring my heart out these next few days. 
The picture you see here is the moment they allowed my husband back into the room after my 13 hour long surgery. Monday December 12, 2016 @ 9:36pm . My mom and sister in-law were there too standing on the other side of me.
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