My Surgical Journey
It has been a while since my last post, and a lot has happened.
During all of this, I was also diagnosed with facial melanoma — something that quickly became the priority, because my thoracic surgeon wanted that resolved before he would operate on the mass in my chest. At the same time, I was pushing for a December surgery for the mediastinal mass because December is the slow season for my business, and I had also already reached my out-of-pocket maximum with my insurance.
Everything converged.
They scheduled my surgery for December 18th.
My melanoma excision took place on November 1, 2025, and the margins were clear. There was no spread beyond the angry mole that started the whole chain of events. That news brought a wave of relief I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath for.
I had about two weeks of peace.
Then, on November 15th, I had one of my pre-operative appointments for the mass removal.
My surgeon explained the plan:
a Robotic Assisted Posterior Mediastinal Mass Resection.
He told me I would likely go home the next day.
He said recovery would be “a breeze” because I’m young and otherwise healthy.
Then they sent me for a lung function test.
I asked why I needed it.
They told me, very casually, that during surgery they would collapse my lung and move it out of the way in order to reach the mass, and that I would wake up with a chest tube.
This was not what I had imagined.
That conversation shifted everything.
Suddenly this didn’t feel like a routine surgery. It sounded invasive, frightening, and painful. Still, I was reassured. I went home and did what every anxious patient does: I researched. Again.
I found very little.
People who undergo similar surgeries usually do so for dramatically different reasons — cancer, trauma, lung disease — and it made finding anyone with a story like mine nearly impossible. But one theme kept appearing in nearly every account:
“Rough recovery.”
Around the same time, another fear crept in:
What if the melanoma had spread?
What if this mass wasn’t benign after all?
December 18th could not come fast enough.
Surgery Day
That morning, I walked into the massive university hospital just five miles from my home, and I was terrified.
My only prior surgeries had been my elbow tendon repair at a stunning sports medicine facility that treats professional athletes, and my MOHS procedure at a beautiful dermatology center. This place felt… very different.
Imagine the DMV. But for surgery.
A huge brown-and-gray waiting room. Flu season. About sixty people sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, some patients, some families, all waiting to be called back. Eventually, my name was called and I was taken to a prep area with roughly forty curtained rooms, all full of people scheduled for 7:00 a.m. surgeries.
All of these surgeries were starting at once?
I was told I would meet the anesthesiologist and the full surgical team beforehand. Instead, the only person who came in was a wonderfully kind nurse who I instantly liked, but I couldn’t shake the feeling of unease. I hadn’t seen my surgeon. I hadn’t met anesthesia. No one had really explained what the next few hours would look like.
Then surgery was delayed because the robot had an issue.
Oh.
Great.
They gave me pre-op meds, and shortly after 8:00 a.m., I was wheeled back. The operating room looked like a high-school computer lab hidden in a basement. The robot, however, was impressive. Still, I hadn’t seen my surgeon.
Anesthesia took over.
I learned later that the procedure officially started at 8:30 a.m. and was finished by 9:30 a.m. I remember waking up and seeing the clock at 10:45 a.m. Then nothing again until around 11:45 a.m., when I finally stayed awake.
What I felt when I woke up is difficult to describe.
I have broken bones.
I have torn tendons.
I live with ankylosing spondylitis.
I have given birth — naturally.
This pain eclipsed all of it.
It was excruciating, unrelenting, and overwhelming.
None of the medications touched it.
I could barely take a breath — only shallow, panicked inhales.
I had four incisions and a chest tube:
two on my back and three total along the left side of my rib cage.
They gave me:
a nerve block
ice
narcotics
nerve pain medication
muscle relaxers
Nothing even softened it.
I sat in that pain until around 7:00 p.m., when the second dose of nerve medication finally took a small edge off. Not relief. Just… a fraction of tolerable.
And that was only the beginning. The first night in the hospital was long.
Every breath hurt.
Every movement felt like it pulled on something deep inside my chest.
The chest tube was the worst of it. A constant, sharp reminder with every inhale that something unnatural was sitting between my ribs.
Sleep came in fragments. Nurses came and went. Monitors beeped. Time moved strangely, as if it were both dragging and disappearing at the same time.
By the next day, they were already talking about discharge. I remember thinking: How is this possible? I could barely sit upright without shaking. Walking was out of the question. My chest felt like it had been taken apart and stitched back together with barbed wire. But I finally walked, and then went home.
At home, the pain shifted from surgical shock into something deeper and more complicated. Nerve pain, rib pain, lung pain, muscle pain, emotional pain. I could feel all of it. Together and separately. Breathing felt unfamiliar. My chest didn’t move the way it used to. Every cough, every laugh, every attempt at a deep breath reminded me of how fragile I suddenly felt.
Then came the emotional crash.
No one warns you about that part of thoracic surgery.
The sadness.
The irritability.
The heaviness.
The fear that seems to live in your body even when your mind knows you’re safe.
It felt like my nervous system had been completely overwhelmed and didn’t know how to return to normal. Some days I was calm. Other days I was angry. Some moments I felt grateful. Others I just felt empty.
I learned later that this is common. It is a post-surgical stress response, especially after chest surgery. But at the time, it was frightening to feel so unlike myself as I am generally a happy and balanced person.
And through all of it, I was just sitting around waiting. Waiting for the pathology report.
When the results finally came back, they didn’t say cancer. They didn’t say metastasis.They didn’t say malignancy.
They said:
Benign cyst. Ciliated columnar epithelial lining. Consistent with a paravertebral Müllerian mediastinal cyst. Müllerian cyst of Hattori.
A rare, congenital condition caused by tissue that belongs in the reproductive system but ended up in the chest during embryonic development, quietly growing for decades, irritating nerves, pressing on structures, and creating symptoms that never quite made sense until now.
It was completely removed.
When I went looking for information about Müllerian cysts of the mediastinum — especially cysts of Hattori — there was almost nothing from a patient’s perspective. I created this space for anyone else who might find themselves here someday, staring at a CT scan, afraid of the unknown, wondering if they are imagining their symptoms.
You are not imagining them. You are not alone. And there is life on the other side of this.
If this is your story too, I’m glad you found your way here.
