Waiting Again
While I really suspected I had breast cancer, I had only imagined up to the biopsy, so after the biopsy I became incredibly relieved. I had a huge bruise and my breast was quite sore and that I really thought was ENOUGH. So I know convinced myself that I was done, I wasn't going to worry. So I had a nice weekend.
The Call
On Monday morning I got a call from the doctor who had performed my biopsy. She told me I had cancer. She told me to call my doctor who had the name of the surgeon. My legs started to tremble and I heard about one in every three words the doctor told me - I was in a fuzzy fog of fear.
I started making the phone calls, which was incredible relieving - an action I could do. But once I was done making the phone calls, I was all alone, in the house with cancer.
C. had been preparing for a bunch of meetings that were all happening this Monday and so I couldn't call her to ruin her day.
I did an exercise tape and waited till lunch time to ruin C.'s day.
I was afraid, and I started to think that the breast cancer police would descend upon me and take me to surgical Gitmo where my breasts would be forcibly removed from me, my head shaved and poison dripped into my veins.
The surgeon's office called back and was able to re-schedule my appointment to Tuesday afternoon, which was lucky because I would have been a wreck waiting till Friday to get actual information. So on Tuesday C. worked from home and I went off to my morning trapeze class where I pretty much lost it in public - it's hard to sob really hard when hanging upside down, but it can be done.
However the surgeon, a brilliant 12 year old Vietnamese American who had somehow managed to graduate from Harvard and Columbia all before puberty had a lot of good news. For example I didn't need any really traumatic surgery, I just needed a lumpectomy. And she thought I was a great candidate for this targeted radiation therapy which was rather new, so she wandered out to find the radiation oncologist who was a big puppy of a Persian American who was totally excited about targeted radiation - twice a day for 5 days as opposed to once a day for 5 weeks. It made sense to me to have a lumpectomy and a shorter, more targeted, less disfiguring form of radiation so that's what I signed up for.
MRI
The next day I got to have my first MRI and my first injection of radioactive dye. My friend T. was sweet enough to give me some of his Xanax so I wouldn't have to have an MRI without anti-anxiety drugs.
And here was another example of why having the best and newest expensive machines is so great. My MRI machine was pretty new, and it was open on both ends! Yea!
So the machine had a table that had two square holes that were rather large and a Mr. Coffee coffee filter on the bottom of the hole. I was supposed to lay down on my stomach with my boobs hanging down into the holes (they didn't reach the coffee filters at all) and not breathe heavy. It's hard not to be conscious of your breathing when you are resting your sternum on a beam with your boobs in a hole. MRIs make really loud noises, but they are not musical. It would be really better if the noises they made had some sort of coherent musical narrative. I had been lying on my stomach listening to the noises for quite a while when the noise started sounding like bells ringing. You know the great cathedral bells that reverberate through your body. Gonggggg! Gongggggg! GOnggggggggg!!! GONGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!
They kept on getting louder and more resonant - we were really leading up to the crescendo of the piece and it was supposed to end on a great resounding note. But NO! I wasn't done. They need to get a composer to help design these things.
After my MRI I had three weeks till my surgery.
Three weeks to freak out.
Three weeks to tell people.
Three weeks to put things in order.
Surgery
I really like my surgeon. I really like the C-S breast center. I really had no idea what surgery would be like. Never having had any before. The night before I took a anti-anxiety drug so I could get a good night's sleep. It sort of worked, but I was up early so I could spend as long as possible awake without eating or drinking. It was a rainy day and the beloved C.'s father was coming to pick us up and take us to the breast center and spend the day with C. while I was in surgery. I was walking the dogs and when I came back Dad was there with C and they were slightly panicked. Apparently the hospital had called wanting to know where the hell we were. We had been told to arrive at 9:00 because the surgery was scheduled for 10:00 but the radiology people wanted us there sooner. So we were already late. Luckily we live close to the breast center. We got there and I was taken back into pre-op land immediately. There were a whole bunch of bays, with medical beds and little curtains to partition off the bays for when privacy was needed. Not that there is actually privacy when it comes to hospital land.
The firs thing you need for a lumpectomy is to have a needle locator put in your boob where the tumour is. You can't actually see the tumour unless it's really exceptional so they cut around the wire locator. You can imagine that the locator is key to getting the tumour. The more accurate the placement the more accurate the surgery and the less tissue they have to remove. So I went down to the radiology department in my little hospital gown, slippers and a blanket. Every radiology person I met reminded me that I wasn't on time - which you know, wasn't true, the hospital had told me the wrong time. The radiation tech who walked me down, after complaining about my tardiness, put me in a room with a mammogram machine. So I had to ask, why are we in a room with a mammogram machine? And she said that the doctor would use it to put in the needle. I then said that, no, that wasn't the machine we were going to use to place the needle in my boob, we were going to use the sonogram because you can't see my tumour with the mammogram. So she made me sit down and she looked at my chart and she told me to wait. I was a late, persnickety patient, but you have to ask for what you think is right, and I knew that the accuracy wasn't going to be right with the x-ray. She came back and then said, yes I needed a sonogram and plopped me into a wheel chair outside the sonogram room where I waited for 20 minutes. You know those pictures of old people in wheel chairs, drooping over, their spines so bent their chins are on their knees? Well it's not a function of being old, it's a function of being in the wheel chair. I slumped, bored and suddenly I was bent over like a woman with a widow's hump. Anyway the doctor, eventually came and after asking me about when I was supposed to arrive he placed the needle in using the sonogram and he nailed it smack dab in the middle.
Then I was back to pre-op land. They put in an IV for the anesthesia and one of the researchers came in and got me to give her a saliva sample and they let C. come in to hold my hand until they wheeled me out to the operating room. The anesthesiologist came by and explained what he was going to do and he put this pink fluid into my open line to relax me and they started to wheel me away.
The pink juice relaxed me. As we were rolling through the hallways I said "WEEEEEEE! This is better than Disneyland!!!!!!" And the nurse replied, "We're not going that fast." And I said "Go Faster!!!!"
Post-Op
When C. came back into Post-Op land to help me wake up after the surgery, apparently I was already making waves. The nurse asked her if I would stop it. Apparently I was making faces at the woman across the aisle in her hospital bed. Camden asked me to stop and I said "But she smiled at me!"
Always entertaining. I don't remember that. I remember being really discombobulated and having problems sitting up and getting dressed. I had a surgical bra on and a lot of packing and a large tube coming out (I later measured the tube, it was 16 inches long.) of the packing. The nurses hadn't seen a tube before and they didn't know if something had gone wrong or not. Eventually they safety pinned the end to my bra.
I was on the other side of surgery. I had had 5 lymph nodes removed, which was more than expected. They had every indication from the initial pathology that they had clear margins (I was in two research protocols about pathology margin testing and those tests were good as well). I could go home with my pain pills and loved ones and tube.
They just forgot to tell me that my pee would be blue.
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