we all hold a story worth sharing…

By Lauren W.

Nine years ago, I came home from my double mastectomy and learned that the hardest parts of recovery were not necessarily the parts anyone had prepared me for.

I was a single mom with a three-year-old daughter, running a horse farm with 30 horses. I had drains coming out of my body, limited use of my arms, a reconstruction to protect, and a life that had not stopped for surgery.

Before I left the hospital, my medical team explained the drains, restrictions, incisions and follow-up appointments. But surgical wounds, drains and recovery protocols are familiar to medical professionals. None of it was familiar to me. This was my body, my child still needing me, my responsibilities still waiting, and my fear that one wrong movement could hurt something that had just been surgically rebuilt.

There was what I had been told. Then there was the reality I had to live.

I learned quickly how little support existed for that reality. The recovery garment I had been given did not fit my reconstruction properly and was contributing to a negative outcome. I could not keep wearing it. I remember being outraged that I had just undergone a double mastectomy and the solution I had been handed did not work for my body.

I needed a way to manage my drains and reduce the risk of snagging them. I needed comfort, but more than that, I needed to feel less vulnerable. I still had to be a mother, run a farm and function in a life that had not stopped.

So I created something that would.

That was where RecoverEase began. It did not begin in a conference room or with a business plan. It began because I was a woman in the middle of a difficult recovery who was angry that there was not something better.

But the physical recovery was only one part of what stayed with me.

A double mastectomy can be a gory, lonely experience. Mine left me afraid of my own body. Nine years later, I still carry that with me. I still feel differently about my body than I did before surgery.

Physical recovery is measured carefully: whether an incision is healing, whether drains can come out, whether reconstruction is progressing. What no one prepared me for was the other recovery—the emotional recovery, the spiritual recovery, the recovery of identity. No one prepared me for the possibility that I might never feel exactly the same about myself again.

Then, nine years after my surgery, my sister had a double mastectomy.

I thought I knew how to help her. I had spent nearly a decade in this space and built a company around helping women recover. I could make sure she had the garments, supplies and practical things I had wished for during my own recovery.

I thought I could prepare her.

I could not.

Her experience was almost nothing like mine.

She had her double mastectomy this July and began reconstruction with expanders. For three weeks, she recovered with the expectation that, however slowly and painfully, she was moving forward. Then tissue around her incision began to die. She needed emergency surgery to remove the necrotic tissue. Her surgical site was opened again, she lost additional tissue, more drains were placed, and her recovery effectively started over.

Three weeks later, she became dangerously sick from an aggressive staph infection in the right side of her reconstruction. She came frighteningly close to septic shock and was taken back into emergency surgery. This time, she lost the entire right side of her reconstruction.

Again, she was back at the beginning.

For two and a half months, my sister has been unable to make meaningful progress out of the acute phase of recovery. She has had drains in some form for that entire time. Each time it seemed she might finally move forward, another complication pulled her back into another surgery, another drain, another beginning.

She expected a straightforward recovery. I did too.

Watching her made me understand something I thought I already knew: there is no single story of recovery.

My experience is not my sister’s, and hers will not be the next woman’s. A smooth recovery is one possibility, but so are infections, delayed healing, additional surgeries, prolonged drains, grief, fear, anger and exhaustion. There can also be relief, humor, resilience and unexpected strength. No one woman’s story can prepare another woman for everything that may come.

But together, our stories can offer something closer to the truth.

That is why we are creating Survivor Stories from RecoverEase.

I do not want this to be a collection of polished testimonials or tidy stories about overcoming adversity. I want it to be a place for women to talk honestly about what happened: what recovery really felt like, what nobody warned them about, what frightened them, what helped, what hurt, what surprised them and what they wish they had known.

Doctors can explain surgery, treatment and the mechanics of recovery. But sometimes the person who can best illuminate what it feels like to live through it is another woman who already has.

That is the resource I wish I had nine years ago. It is the resource I wish my sister had before her surgery this summer.

My hope is that Survivor Stories becomes a place where one woman can read another woman’s experience and find something she did not know she needed: a practical detail, a warning, a moment of recognition, a little hope, or simply the comfort of realizing someone else understands.

I also hope the women who share their stories feel heard, understood and valued. What women endure through treatment, surgery and recovery deserves more than a clinical summary. Their experiences matter, including the difficult parts, the complicated parts and the parts that never resolve neatly.

No one experience is the roadmap. But together, perhaps our stories can become one.

For the next woman.