Surgery approved! hooray!

 I'm just living the end of "Batman: The Movie" starring Adam West where every nation is getting the good news. "Success, success! They've done it!"

Why, you may ask, have I not talked that much about surgery up until this point? Well, I was waiting for insurance to approve it. Because that's the world we live in, where your double mastectomy has to be approved by insurance before you can feel confident telling people about it. 

Anyway, I'll be getting a double mastectomy, plus they'll be removing a number of lymph nodes (since the cancer had moved into my lymph nodes, and that's how they originally found it). This will be happening the Monday after Thanksgiving, and the plan is for me to go home the same day. Originally I had thought I'd need to stay overnight, so this is great news. 

I'm not looking forward to it in the traditional sense, but I am looking forward to being done with this step.

Edited to add 1/16/26: I somehow didn't put anything in here about how there are garments specifically for breast cancer surgical recovery! There's a whole weird little boutique that's like a fancy lingerie shop, and you have to get a referral from the hospital to even go, and they work with insurance and you can get sort of compression tank top things with drain pockets to wear as you're recovering from surgery. You can also get prosthetics and garments with places for prosthetics if this is something that helps you feel more like you. (I didn't have any interest in the aesthetic garments but the recovery tank tops were INCREDIBLY helpful and it was worth the hassle of going to get them. Drain management is really annoying.)