"I'd love to help, but you have the wrong number."
The day of my mastectomy, my life long friends did the funniest thing, by mistake. A mistake we are all still laughing about!
On the day of my mastectomy, three of my closest friends were with me. One is a trained nurse. They brought me home to Jennifer's. I was groggy and fell sound asleep. The nurse friend went home. When I woke up, Laurel and Jennifer helped me to the bathroom. I heard them laughing in the other room. Hysterical laughter. I was still out of it and couldn't figure out what could possibly be so funny. When I walked into the other room, I found out. While I was in the bathroom, Jennifer and Laurel were trying to figure out which one of them could change my bandages. I was cut from side to side. The tumor was in my left breast. The surgeons extracted the tumor then a large chunk of tissue around the tumor--plus a couple of my lymph glands. Then, they grabbed a bunch of tissue from my right breast to even things out. I had incisions from side to side. Plus, these weird little bottles hanging down from the bandages--to catch the drainage. Laurel and Jennifer knew it was time to change my bandages, and they were gagging at the thoughts of doing so.
They decided to text our friend, the nurse. They staged a picture holding the barf bags the hospital gave me. They both faked vomiting at the thoughts of changing my bandages! They uploaded the photo to our nurse friend with the caption: "We think it's time to change April's bandages, and it's grossing us out! Please come back and change them!"
They quickly got a response, "I'd love to help, but you have the wrong number."
I couldn't stop laughing! "I'd love to help, but you have the wrong number!" Hilarious.
Eventually, they got the photo and the message to our nurse friend. She came over and changed the gross bandages. I was awake and we all sat around laughing, telling stories for at least another hour!
Laughter! Yes, that's another of my important, positive, coping mechanisms.