9.28.22

We were able to do our follow up appt a day early! It’s crazy how fast your perspective can change. Our plastic surgeons appt on Monday felt a little deflating. We left there, not sure what our next move would be. I actually sent out a couple emails to two of my doctors just asking questions. My surgeon called me back to shed some more light on my situation. I have the original lump but there are “satellite” cells that branch off of the main lump that showed up in my MRI. She did say that we could still do a lumpectomy if I really wanted to but she can’t guarantee that she’ll get all the cancer. I’m not going to go through all of this and then worry about not getting all the cancer! It’s not the update we wanted to hear. But it clearly takes some options off the table. It’s like when you go to the ice cream store and there are 50 different flavors and you don’t know what one you want… you finally make your decision and then you wonder if you should have picked a different one. We don’t have that problem now…

A couple of positives in all of this. I got the results of my blood work. They came back negative! So that’s good. Especially for the girls… At least we don’t have to worry about them having a genetic predisposition to this. Also, if everything stays as is… I may not have to do chemo. They did a test (sorry I can’t remember what it was exactly) but it basically said that chemo wouldn’t necessarily be beneficial for me. There is an exception: If when they remove the cancer and find that the lump is over 5cm OR that I have it in more than four lymph nodes then I will need to do chemo. (Then there is a risk that it could have traveled in my blood stream to a different location- we could risk finding cancer in a different location a couple years down the road.) The MRI doesn’t show anything suspicious in my lymph nodes so that’s good! We won’t know for sure until surgery and they get them under a microscope. I asked if I need to worry about the cancer moving like into my chest wall or anything like that. The oncologist said the MRI is pretty accurate and according to that it doesn’t look like that’s the case with me. Of course we won’t know for sure until the the cancer is removed and they can see a clear margin (no cancer on the edges of the tissue removed.)

Monday and Tuesday were hard for me. It was kind of like getting gut punched… Today I’m doing pretty good. I know there will still be rollercoasters of emotions through all of this. Especially as we get closer to a surgery date. (We don’t have one yet. I’m waiting for a call back from my surgeon and probably the plastic surgeon so we can go over our plans.) I want to thank you all for your prayers. We feel good where things are at and I know that’s God. How can it not be?

The oncologist said today his main job was to get the cancer out of me. And that’s what we want too!