Hi Friends,

Tomorrow (Tuesday 9/28/2021) at 7:30am CT is my surgery time. Please send me good thoughts, or prayers, or visualizations of a complication free surgery. Send them in your hearts, via text, via email or good ol’ snail mail. Please don’t expect a response for a while….I might be on narcotics for a few days. 

Most of you know in excruciating detail about tomorrow’s Fallopian Tube removal surgery, and have asked who’s hosting the meal train. A few of you might be like “Lerner, long time, TMI”.  For those in the second camp, your getting this email because your face has also popped up among the folks “that love me, from my past, present, or future” that are “watching from the gallery, keeping your body and spirit safe” in a surgery specific guided meditation I’ve been doing for the past few days. So that’s cool. And weird. Needless to say, you guys are my people. And if you were going through surgery I’d want to know too. 

Tomorrow’s Fallopian tube removal is a cancer risk reduction surgery. This is the first of a handful of prophylactic surgeries I’ll be undergoing due to my BRCA2+ status. Prophylactic means “intended to prevent disease”, aka removing currently healthy body parts because this is less traumatic than the likely alternative. Being BRCA2+  puts me at an 85% chance of breast cancer and a 20-30% chance of ovarian cancer. They think that the majority of BRCA2 related ovarian cancer’s start in the Fallopian tubes, so doing this surgery allows me to wait until my mid 40’s to hope for better screening and treatment options or remove my ovaries then when I’m “closer to natural menopause age”. 

Tomorrow is an outpatient laparoscopic surgery, so not really “that big of a deal” compared to what I’ll be doing next year to reduce my breast cancer risk. The hardest part of tomorrow’s surgery will be the four week lifting restriction. As the primary caregiver of two kids who can’t wipe their own butts yet, that means I can’t be alone with the boys for an entire month. 

Thankfully my parents will be in town for the month to help when Mike is at work. Most of you know they now have a house within walking distance of ours in Madison (they are splitting time between Ohio and Madison)! I’m so grateful! My brother will also be in town from Albuquerque helping for the first ten days. Because of all of this help and the expectation that after a week or two I’ll be a half-functioning (non-lifting) member of the family able to chop vegetables again, we will not be doing a meal train…..

Don’t worry. A meal train is in your future. If sarcasm isn’t your jam, please don’t read the book I’m working on about learning of my BRCA2 status in my 20’s, before kids. I’ll save you the eye rolls. Just be thankful that sarcasm is a healthier coping mechanism than alcohol. When it comes time for my double prophylactic mastectomy (aka removing my boobs) and reconstruction, the healing will be way more intense and we will share lots of opportunities for support. My mastectomy will likely be in March or fall of 2022. How I choose to remake my future, smaller, very perky breasts will factor into when this big surgery is (and if I’ll need additional “smaller” surgeries before or after). More on that later. I see my plastic surgeon next month to help me hone this path. 

But for today, the focus is only on tomorrow. Mike and I will be at the hospital at 6am and hopefully home by early afternoon. I’ll send an update in a few days or a week. In the meantime, please know I sleep with my phone off, so texts or emails are great. 

Have a good night. And thanks for your love. 

Love,

Jessie

#BRCA #BRCA2 #EmailToFriendsNFamily