The bone scan machine.
As much as I want to insist that I have been completely calm and relaxed and haven’t thought about cancer at all this past week I would be a liar. Staying positive is hard work and pretty much impossible. You feel like the bringer of doomsday, but these days, EVERYTHING is cancer. Acne = cancer. Sore toe = cancer. Mole = cancer. You name it… luckily I only panic about things that realistically could become/be cancer (at least I tell myself that). I am not sure when things stop being cancer in your mind. I really couldn’t actually believe that the lump I had was going to be cancer (the statistical possibility, at 30 years old, was extremely low, but someone does always have to be THE statistic). This is maybe why I overreact about every other lump, bump, ache and pain. I can’t discount this type of experience though, women who find out that they have mets (metastatic disease) find out in these kinds of circumstances, which is why it can be super scary.
I forget people aren’t obsessed with researching breast cancer online like I am (fascinated, seriously, fascinated…). If you are diagnosed at stage I even if you have treatment you can have a breast cancer tumor show up somewhere else in your body. This now means you have stage IV or metastatic breast cancer, not stage I anymore. No one dies of stage I cancer, people die of stage IV cancer, which means the cancer eventually moved elsewhere in the body and took up residence. Metastatic breast cancer does not have a cure at the moment, treatment has improved, mets patients live longer and more comfortable lives than they did 10 years ago, but it isn’t a life you would personally go out and choose for yourself. Mets patients live from scan to scan and one chemo drug to the next. If this ever becomes my fight I will certainly take it on, but at the moment I really think it would be cool to someday be declared in remission.
We treated the cancer in my breast and armpit, there is very little chance it will ever grow back there. The teensy chance is my lungs, liver and bones. So a four week back ache becomes a pretty serious concern, even though the chances are still low that it is actually caused by cancer. I have never had a back ache like this that has lasted this long with medication.
One of my employees told me to stay away from “Dr. Google” and explained that they look up everything related to their young daughter and freak out because according to Dr. Google she has had about 72 fatal illnesses. So true… I try to be careful what I look up and how much I take it seriously. I am not a medical professional, and every ache and bump is probably going to freak me out. Mike and I decided that we will have a scare regularly every few months and hopefully they get further and further apart or less and less intense. It just complicates things when the results of a test, no matter how low the possibility is of it being cancer, mean life or death.
Don’t worry about me dying from cancer, I am probably going to die of a heart attack at this rate. YEESH.
I went in this morning and got my radioactive isotopes injected. The radiation tech that injected me was wearing very little protective gear, so it seemed that my assumption about the level of the radiation involved may have been a bit over the top. PET CT, they tell you not to hug babies. Bone scan – meh – do whatever, hug ALL of the babies. The machine was exactly like the one they use for the mugga scan. Between injection and scan we barely had any time to run a few errands, eat lunch and get back to the hospital to get scanned.
You can see my hip bones on the monitor. Creepy.
I asked the tech when they expected to have the results, she told me my doctor would have them at 5:00. This means I called at 4:30 and left a message for my oncology nurse that I heard they may have them this afternoon (hint hint). After the scans were done I went home and curled up in bed and took a nap. The emotions wrapped up in these tests are exhausting, and it is impossible to not take in “all of the possibilities.” Plus it seems to be that when we are overly optimistic it doesn’t turn out, so pessimism has paid off the last few times… sort of.
The nurse called and told me that my scans came back perfectly clean. In fact, they were freakishly clean, I had no “uptake” of the isotopes at all anywhere in my skeleton. I have never broken a bone and I have no spots on my bones mending themselves anywhere. AWESOME news for my skeleton, but now I have to figure out which one of the 1,000+ things that cause back pain (thanks Dr. Google) is causing mine. Right now I lean with the surgeon’s opinion, the pain is awfully close to where they took the muscles out of my back to be “coincidence.” Now that we know it is a soft tissue problem (even though the previous soft tissue treatments weren’t fruitful), we have narrowed down the possibilities. Hopefully we can come to a conclusion, resolution or a miracle.
I actually had three days with little to no pain, so maybe I am healing, but I ended up sore again Tuesday and it could be a combination of stress and sore back that make a super sore back, maybe I just need a hot massage… Now I think I definitely “need” a massage. I am new to the world of back pain (I certainly have pulled out my lower back a few times, but the mid-back is foreign to me). I guess we will see, but the “worst” possible cause is ruled out, so now we can look for solutions and hopefully get everything back in order.
I am also getting a new chair at work and we are going to replace our ten year old mattress at home. We will figure it out. 
The view of Huntsman Cancer Institute from the breast cancer wing.
I don’t know where I come up with these titles I swear… So… the pain in my neck got better, but the spot in my mid back got worse. Mike and I swore at the internet yesterday because there is just way too much available information when it comes to cancer, side effects and all other lovely things from Cancertown.
I had my appointment this morning. I had called the nurse a couple of days ago to see if I should see my Medical Oncologist rather than the Surgical Oncologist that I was scheduled to see. She suggested that I see whoever could see me first. I was already booked with the surgeon because of the weird lumps, so I opted to go in and see her, even though my lumps had all gone away. She looked at me and felt like I needed to go to physical therapy because of the location of the pain on my back the back pain (a couple of inches below my back incisions), she wanted to see what my Medical Oncologist thought about it and went to consult with her.
She came back and made me bend in different directions and poked along my back and I discovered that bending backwards was a good way to set off the pain (any other direction and I was fine, poking I was fine, but bending backwards…). YOWZA! After bending me backward she held my arms back and pushed on the spot. My back is super pissed this evening.
My Medical Oncologist was busy seeing new patients today so she had to sneak over to see me in between appointments. She is such a fun lady. She gave Mike and I each a gumball and she asked me a few questions (Mike got stuck with the pink gumball because SOMEONE took the white one, not sure who, *cough cough*). She told me that normally she would tell me to go home and take IB Profin for two weeks, but I had already done that. I had sincerely hoped that IB Profin and muscle relaxers would do the trick, but they didn’t even touch the pain. So she opted to go ahead and order a bone scan. She noted that the chance that my back pain was cancer was minimal, but that we would check to be sure.
Quote from WebMD:
Just before the scan begins, you will probably be asked to empty your bladder to prevent any radioactive urine from blocking the view of your pelvic bones during the scan.
I got to work and found a cute present and note on my desk.
Radioactive urine, you heard it. Apparently bone scans are a hot commodity at Huntsman and they couldn’t get me in next week so they set up an appointment at the U of U to get it done Wednesday. I go in at 10:30 for the injection to make my bones glow and at 1:30 for the scan. So it will be a full day at the hospital (maybe we will sneak out and do some shopping while we wait for me to become properly radioactive). I do figure that I am still owed some super powers after all of the nuclear medicine that has been injected into me and along with radiation treatment. Certainly I will be able to fly by the end of next week!
So I am hopeful to get the test done and probably head off to physical therapy as my next step. I am open to whatever solution gets my back to stop aching and gets the gnawing worry out of my mind. Life has been awesome, and I want it to keep being awesome! I have a trip to Hawaii to plan. Mike won free hotel and airfare to Hawaii at work this week!
On the High Line in New York City
I feel like a pain in the neck, but really, I actually have been having pain in my neck.
I got a cold after my trip to New York last month (yes, I went back to NYC, luckily it remained adventure free this time, unlike my crazy trip in October). On my flight out the flight attendant pointed at my lymphedema sleeve and asked if I had “earned it.” I stared blankly at him for a moment and once it connected in my brain I blushed and said “yes.” He and I chatted later on during the flight, he had recently finished treatment for colon cancer (he didn’t look a day over 40). He was very sweet and I realized that my sleeve is a giveaway that I had cancer, but I did “earn it.” So be it. The cold went away and then my body started acting up.
Every ache and pain in your body is under a microscope as you navigate life after cancer treatment. Aches stand behind a megaphone shouting directly in your ear. My past two weeks have been filled with a body not quite wanting to be agreeable. I had a lump show up in my right armpit (cancer-free side), I let it sit for a couple of days and gave in and called one of the nurses at Huntsman. An appointment was booked and the appointment was subsequently moved around a few times. Once it was moved by me because of a meeting and it was moved few more times because of difficulty squeezing me in and emergencies that came up (my surgical oncologist is a very busy woman, it took me 14 days to get in to see her the first time). I am still never certain which oncologist to go see when something pops up (I have three, a surgical oncologist (surgery to treat cancer), a medical oncologist (chemo to treat cancer) and a radiation oncologist (radiation to treat cancer)).
While I was dancing the appointment jig another lump showed up in my left side. Both went away by the time the nurses called and said that they could just go ahead and schedule the ultrasound. At that point there wasn’t much to look at so we opted to delay any tests unless another lump showed up. While my armpits were being lumpy also had some neck and back pain show up. It was bad enough to bring a few tears to my eyes here and there. It hasn’t been debilitating (didn’t stop me from lifting things), but it has been enough to make me uncomfortable when I sit still for an extended period of time. I have a new lump in my right armpit today (third one), so I guess they may have something to look at next week. This has all been combined with some fatigue so I am just one big ball of tired sore lumpy nerves (I am just one huge party).
This time I have just wanted to ignore it rather than go in, but my family members don’t support that strategy. I will get to go see a doctor one of these days soon to rule out the scarier possibilities of my back pain, neck pain and lumpy armpits. The spine and lymph nodes are the more common spots for breast cancer metastasis if it does occur. The lumps in my armpits are just strange because they keep showing up and going away (a persistent lump is something to be a bit more worried about, I am just more curious about them at this point). A year and a half ago I would have ignored all of this (after two weeks of back pain I may have given in and gone to see my general practitioner), but now every ache has a new meaning and a taste of fear tied up in it with a pretty little pink bow (I did seriously try to avoid going in about my lump in my breast, because there was just no possible way that it was cancer *sigh*).
I am more sensitive to pain than I was before treatment. I don’t know if it is related to nerve damage from chemo or if I am just hypersensitive now. Colds are about twice what they used to be and my arthritis seems to have a bit more of a bite. Which also has made me decide that I am now a crochety old woman with nothing to do but complain about my medical maladies. Which makes me a pain in the neck.
Life has been good beyond my little worries. I am enjoying the rewarding challenges of my job (it is good to work for a nonprofit company that makes a real impact in many people’s lives), spending time with my husband and just enjoying life in general (don’t take my posting about aches as a dissatisfaction with the awesome things in my life, I just figure I should record the realisms good and bad as they occur – the blog has been a way to get things down “on paper,” my public therapy). I spend more time sitting on the back porch enjoying a little sun on my face, smelling a few more roses and sneaking a few extra snuggles and kisses from my hubsters.
There are a lot of people that survive cancer treatment, I plan to be one of them. After freaking out over a bad pap and three lumps in what is now my left breast, I am exhausted from letting myself worry too much and I choose to be optimistic instead. I will continue to live like I am living and take it from there.
Sunset in New York
I have been having a lot of nerves wake up lately.
Celebrating life with my friends and showing off my curly hair right after my third haircut.
Public Service Announcement: Tune out on this post if you are queasy about nerves and surgery stuff, but I am posting this for women considering reconstruction, a mastectomy, or are just strangely curious about your body after such events (I find this stuff fascinating).
When I was 12 years old I was hit by a car when I was riding my bike across a crosswalk in front of my junior high. It was raining and the 17 year old driving her mom’s car was going 40 MPH. I was a lucky goose and she only hit the back tire of my bike. I am still not sure if she was going too fast or if I gauged the whole thing wrong. My knee broke the plastic gear shifter on my older brother’s mountain bike and I was thrown several feet in the air with my leg hitting against the plastic (sorry about your bike Justin). It sliced through my leg to the bone. I didn’t have a single broken bone. I had been tossed in the air like a ragdoll and my bones stayed intact… Which is why I say I was a lucky duck. *knock on wood* I have never broken a bone in my life, but I have had more plastic surgeries than most 32 year old women, none of them actually elective (I should work on that, I am seeing a lot of ladies with some seriously puffy lips on bad reality TV shows lately, not that I ever watch bad reality TV…*cough*).
The doctor at the ER sewed the sutures on my shin too tight, so subsequently the tissue between the stitches ended up dying and I had two plastic surgeries over two summers during my teenage years to make the scar less obvious (thus I didn’t wear shorts or skirts for most of my teenage years because I was usually asked what had happened, my eventual answer was that I should pay better attention when I shave and that one really earned me some funny looks).
My leg in sutures and a polaroid of the bike I was on, note the shape of the back tire.
Why do I tell you this story? I tell you because I am no stranger to nerve damage. Especially after they had removed all of the incision down to the bone and replaced them twice (starting to sound familiar). My nerves never quite stitched themselves back together properly, so the sensation in my leg is “funky.” Not quite numb and the only sensation I have there is pain-ish. So when they removed the latissimus dorsi in my back I expected my back to remain “funky.”
After a bilateral mastectomy your skin is numb up front. Numb to the point that they stick big hollow needles in your chest and fill up breast expanders and the only reason you may react is because the rate at which that butterfly needle comes in you think they are going to poke out your lung. -*SNAP* needle inserted- So imagine the look of surprise on my face when I felt them insert the needle on my right side to expand it after I had a latissimus flap surgery to put the expander back in. My eyes flew wide open and I looked at my favorite nurse Vicki and said “I felt that.” I felt the next one too.
My nerves are in the process of recovering. I am getting a lot of feeling back in my back, I think that will get pretty close to normal as time goes on (benefits of having a good surgeon) and I have some sensation in my chest. I am not sure if I will get more or less, but it seems that bringing the muscle around gave me more active nerves (which is strange at times if I run into something unexpectedly). One thing that you never quite fully expect from a nipple and skin sparing mastectomy is that your nipples still react to cold – but you can’t fully feel it – so you notice it a bit unexpectedly. You learn to wear thicker bras (I have found the Victoria’s Secret wireless bras to be the most comfortable on these days, cheap bras have you aching and sore by the end of the day, you still have plenty of working nerves BEHIND the implants).
The scars are healing nicely and can easily be covered up by my bra or thick swimsuit top.
You get random shooting nerve pain as nerves knit themselves back together, but it is worth it. The scars everywhere are healing very nicely! I am 3 months out after surgery and they are fading more each day. It is amazing and I don’t regret my surgical adventures. I made the right choice for me.
I am as back to “normal” as I think I will ever be. I actually feel like my brain and my body are up to par with pre-treatment Mandi. I may not quite remember what it was like before, but I am better at taking care of me, so maybe it all evens out in the end? I may have to try a little harder to remember some things from last year (I think your brain starts to intentionally forget things or chemo brain kicks in, but either way, some emotions and experiences may best be forgotten). I don’t care to block it out of my life completely, as much as I want to pretend like it never happened, it did happen. I am also fine talking about it with other people (down to the details of my surgeries, because I think surgical options, even with complications, are worth having).
Springtime has come to Utah and with that comes outside time which makes me so happy. I missed the sunshine. When Mike was working from home a gentleman who does yard work stopped by and asked if he could trim the 50 year old ugly bushes out front, Mike called me and I suggested that the gentleman could rip them out instead. So he did, and I came home to a yard with huge uprooted bushes all over.
We have spent the entire weekend digging in the dirt (which apparently my lack of chemo this spring means I don’t have a good excuse to get out of yard work, darn). The bushes took up a lot of space so we have been planting bulbs, smaller bushes, grasses and decorating with rocks. You can actually see the front of our little house now. So strange!
Now we just need more grass.
Mike and I have lived in this house for almost seven years now. I have been itching to buy a new house, but I have been saying that I want a new house for years, so for now we will just keep making this one nicer – at least now that you can see it (I wish I had taken a before photo).
I had planned on going to an Image Reborn retreat in November, but we had too many things going on and I ended up not making it. November was a tough time for me, I was slowly getting my energy back from chemo and radiation. I had promised my nurse Vicki that I would go to one of the retreats (plus I can’t complain about spending a lovely weekend in Park City, considering the last time I stayed up there was when I broke out in a full body rash). This weekend was the retreat that I was finally able to go to. They had even had some last minute cancellations so two amazing women that I know and adore were able to come up this weekend and keep me company.
I learned the couple of days before the retreat how much less I had been thinking about breast cancer because I was suddenly thinking about it a lot more (which is why I called this post “A Trip Back to Cancertown”). I knew that I would be spending the weekend talking about breast cancer with other women, and that we would all be coming from different stages and different lives. The one thing we had in common: breast cancer had impacted us.
I drove up to Park City with Michelle who has been my friend, and hero, throughout my treatment. When we arrived we were graciously invited in and allowed to explore the gorgeous hilltop Park City mansion tucked away in a bunch of aspens. Michelle and selected the guest room at the bottom of the house (which we soon discovered that the many flights of stairs to the main living area would be a great method for working off all of the munching we would be doing all weekend). After we got settled in, the other ladies arrived (there were a total of seven women there this weekend). We then had dinner (which involved salmon, if you know me well, I hate fish… but I gave it a chance and it was actually pretty tasty). My surgeon Dr. Leigh Nuemayer spent time with us and had dinner answering questions everyone had about breast cancer (my main one was what “extensive” meant in my lab reports about the DCIS I had, the short version of the answer I got was that it means my breasts were good at making cancer).
Dr. Nuemayer brought everyone a copy of her book Meet Virginia (<– the site is graphic), it is about the initial type of mastectomy that I had, my reconstruction was a different kind from the book. Dr. Neumayer noted that only 25% of women that have a mastectomy choose to have reconstruction and works hard to educate women about their reconstruction options (hoping that more women will choose to have reconstruction). We stayed up late chit chatting and all wandered off into our own sleeping areas.
Saturday we woke up and had breakfast in our pajamas (this is a retreat right? That means we should stay comfortable!). Breakfast was served by a nutritionist that was involved in a study about diet and its impact on breast cancer recurrence. She touted carrot juice as a major part of the diet and make us carrot/peach/ginger juice that was actually pretty tasty, she even snuck some flax seed into it. After that several of us opted to go for a walk and once we were about 30 minutes into walking I realized that I forgot to bring sunscreen and that I was starting to burn. We turned around and headed back up to the house so that my rudolph nose wouldn’t burn anymore than it had. We relaxed, had lunch and then enjoyed an AMAZING facial and massage.
After a really nice dinner (with dessert of course, life is too short to not eat dessert). We had an art project that kept us occupied for the rest of the evening. We were asked to create collages about our breast cancer journey. Sunday morning we shared our collages and explained them with each other. We then had portraits taken (luckily one of the ladies was nice enough to let me borrow some foundation to tone down rudolph).
I was also excited to discover that Michelle and I both had recently decided to work on our photography skills. Mike bought me a new/used Nikon recently that I have been learning to use. Here are some of the photos I took this weekend:
Aspens near where we stayed.
Scenery on our walk.
Views on our walk. I love the variety of colors in the bushes.
Walking crew.
Waiting for dinner!
More lovely ladies.
Notice how my red face is excluded from this photo set?
Tea and scone. I didn't have my pinky finger out though.
So, to give you a little background on myself. I am not the most positive human being in the universe (I am a cheerful person that likes to smile), but skeptical is my middle name. Quite frankly I don’t have anything to complain about.
I am going to a breast cancer retreat this weekend. I think it is amazing that people and groups organize events like this. They help women like me, manage life with breast cancer in it at some point in time, emotionally and physically. I love local organizations that make a huge difference in the lives of patients and survivors such as the Christi Anderson Rack Pack Foundation, The Cancer Wellness House and Image Reborn Foundation. I am trying on the survivor title, but it doesn’t stick. I still think funding research is important, but I personally I am a bigger fan of the groups that impact individuals and their families.
I am started to wonder if it is like there are cancer clubs. If you have had breast cancer you get to go to this event, but those with cervical cancer can’t come. It could be that I just know about breast cancer groups because that is what I had, so I could be completely wrong in my perception of the cancer universe. I made a classic error when I was at my first day of chemo. I had been given some extra breast cancer gifts I had received because I was young with breast cancer. The person who sat across from me was the mother of someone I knew in junior high and high school and I offered the additional gifts to her. Everything had pink ribbons all over it and I found out later she had just had a recurrence of colorectal cancer. Gah! I am embarrassed.
Those that have been through cancer of one kind in one stage or another face different adventures in life. I can’t turn to a lung cancer patient and ask their advice on a chemo regimen for breast cancer, but we can’t never discount one cancer for another. Someone with bone cancer may not understand what it is like to have a mastectomy, but I will (hopefully) never understand what it is like to have one of the bone cancers. Rare cancers don’t have clubs, groups or organizations (I take that back, there are a lot of organizations for cancer), but it isn’t like the groups centered around one cancer or the other. Cancer is LONELY, you are surrounded by so many people that love you and help take care of you and in my case other women who had had the same chemo and radiation and I was still lonely in a strange way.
I also think about men and women that have debilitating diseases from which there is no possibility of remission and it humbles me.
Cancer is a bunch of mutant cells on a rampage, finding a cure for all cancers would be a major feat! I no longer feel like I belong at a cancer hospital (really, it is awkward). I also feel like I have an ounce of room to complain about the fate that life gave me. I didn’t always make the best choices, but it is what it is. We were/are all dumb teenagers at one point in time and everything causes cancer (yes teenagers you are dumb, you will learn this some day when you grow up, if you grow up…). I am learning to live my life without regrets, with my eyes focused forward and hoping for the best. Life is pretty awesome (if you weren’t fully aware).
Groups which have directly helped me through treatment and beyond (if you are in Utah and seeking breast cancer information, support or other online resources):
P.S. I did update my blog design (evidence I have found time and energy to spare on the weekends), but I still don’t like pink.
My hair seems to be growing upward instead of longer.
A question that seems to creep into my brain these days is whether or not I live like I am going to live or like I am going to die (I think they may be different, but not everyone can spend their last days in a beach house in a foreign country…). This may seem a little crazy, but post treatment and recurrence fears cause you to think carefully about your mortality. I think about it much less than I used to, but it is a thought process that seems unavoidable.
Honestly, if I were gambling in Vegas, the odds are certainly in my favor, but this gamble is my life. The funny thing is that I am not sure what I would change if I were dying.
When I think back to how sick I was last year I am still amazed how sick cancer TREATMENT makes you. Mike keeps reminding me that my experience included a whole ton of surgeries which was a wee bit abnormal. I spent my entire chemo experience waiting for the dam to burst, and it did, a few times. The things that meant the most to me when I was sick were the little things. Such as being able to go to work (for most of my treatment) and make things happen. Spending time with my friends and family. Just spending hours upon hours being dumb and goofy with Mike. So these are the things I treasure more in life.
Mike started a new job while I was in treatment after my third surgery. An awesome and very stressful job. We weren’t quite sure how much we needed to hide my predicament, but luckily it all turned out fine. Right now we have to focus on getting his stress level under control, we have been under so much stress this past year, that we don’t how to turn it off. I really don’t know what it is like to be the caretaker watching your spouse go through treatment, and quite frankly I don’t ever want to ever have to know what it is like. We had so much help from family and friends and the whole thing was still very overwhelming.
As I had said in a previous post that each day brings more clarity. I don’t know how to describe it beyond that. Less stress and my body recuperating bring my brain more and more out of the fog. I am able to function longer and work and come home and cook a meal from scratch. I still get pretty exhausted and spend a lot more time at home relaxing than I used to (before cancer), but it might not really be a bad thing.
So, these days I am determined to choose to live like I am living.
Lunch with Mike.
Seriously. This is ridiculous and the whole thing just makes me tired. Tired to my core, so much stress, waiting, and never-ending surprises certainly knows how to wear you down. First off, I had a bilateral mastectomy, I am not supposed to get breast lumps anymore.
This is another one of those moments where I question about whether or not to blog about something. This time I had to wait until I knew what was going on before making a fuss. Two days after posting that my cervical biopsies came back fine, I found two large lumps in my left breast (cancer side). They were near the bottom of the breast and you can see them visually (I guess I need to look at the bottom as well as the top). They are surrounded with what looked like maybe bruising or thicker patches of blood vessels. I had a dream about my breasts having a dimpled appearance (which is how my aunt found her breast cancer, a dimple) so I looked more closely in the morning, and sure enough a couple of dimples were there. Upon further inspection I verified two distinctive hard lumps (maybe three). I showed them to Mike shortly after. They were all in the part of the breast that had been bruised and darker for most of the healing process over the last six weeks, so I hadn’t really felt around that area and the appearance had been a bit mottled.
I just saw my surgeon and oncologist two weeks ago. So if two large lumps showed up within two weeks, the chance that it would be cancer is pretty low. I would have to have the world’s fastest growing breast cancer (the lumps are large, I had one of the faster growing varieties, but I just had surgery in there seven weeks ago). Online research indicated that the more likely scenario is that my silicone implant has ruptured or that I have fat necrosis (yes, dead fat) from the latissimus flap reconstruction. A possibility that occurs from reconstruction alone and reconstruction on a radiated breast increases the risk.
I have avoided the whole “why me” experience until recently. Now I am starting to get frustrated with the things popping up that add to my inability to really just try to move on. I run on raw anxiety and have been for the last year, this is also incredibly unhealthy for me, so I must find some way to balance this tension somewhere and find ways to cut back on the things that cause additional stress and tension.
Is it a lump under there?
You know you have a lot of doctors when you aren’t exactly sure which ones you need to see for this problem. I called and asked to see my surgical oncologist (who was the one who ordered all of the initial testing they did) or my oncologist. My surgeon is at a conference for a couple of weeks and my oncologist was able to squeeze me in the next day (yay for less time to freak out while waiting for the appointment). So I did get to go in today. She found the lumps without my assistance (she told me not to sway her judgement) and the third one she wrote a question mark on because she was as uncertain as I if it was a mass. The question mark made my mom and I giggle a bit (so mature).
The radiologist took a good look using an ultrasound and a few pictures of the thin amount of skin and muscle on top of the implant abyss (the implant is a dark void in the ultrasound). No one questions that the lumps are there (there were three), but they don’t look like cancer. The most likely option is that they are fat necrosis as I had guessed before my appointment (they didn’t appear to be scar tissue). Biopsy would be a bit dangerous (big needle, little room for error), but the radiologist didn’t feel like it was necessary.
I now see my oncologist in three months instead of six to keep an eye on them and having lumps makes it harder to find new lumps (breast cancer can recur locally on the skin or scar after a mastectomy and radiation). So here I am, post mastectomy, and I still have lumpy boobs. I guess I will take my lumps, as long as they decide not to be cancer.
Tests came back that I am fine! I have very minor cell changes that could be related to chemo or hormone changes from Tamoxifen. Just have to deal with the old cancer stuff now (Tamoxifen and check-ups). No more crazy stress, time to get back on track to normal life and a healthy! I just have to follow up with another pap in six months. YES! Good news, we needed good news.
