One for a win and one for a place

The short version is this: There was a hidden lump behind the lump which turned out to be a lymph node which did have cancerous cells. What originally looked like the main node (and sent to pathology during the op) came back clear. So, even though all the nodes taken came back clear it appears that this hidden or unexpected one showed up and turned out to be positive. Not only that, but the pre cancerous cells, in the other breast, also showed cells just within the margin when the pathology was done on that tissue.

Ming said that I would need to have another op and take more tissue to get a clearance around the last site. He also wanted to take most or all of the lymph nodes from under my right arm to be sure that all the nodes were clear. He recommended that I should have a CT chest, abdomen, pelvis scan and a whole body scan. I’m a little confused about these but one required something to do with nuclear medicine or a radiopharmaceutical injection. (Their words not mine – poisonous substance? Radioactive juice is more my interpretation) The other scan required 3 cups of water containing iodine to be drunk and I think they also injected me with another substance. Something was said about chemotherapy and hormone therapy and of course another round of statistics.

Getting my head around this information was about the hardest thing I have ever had to do as an intellectual exercise. We sat for hours going around and around, through disbelief and rational thinking and then planning and then debating. It’s impossible really; you tell yourself you are educating yourself, gathering information and being informed in the hope of making an educated decision. I had moments of convincing myself that I was lucky to have experts talking me through it; lucky to have research data to reassure me, lucky to be living in the western world and having access to cutting edge technology, lucky to have Medicare, lucky to avoid a mastectomy, lucky to have a good chance of living through this. So, so lucky….But all of that luck still came back to how unlucky and totally confused I was. How barbaric and invasive and primitive and unreliable it all is.

So, I’m back at the racetrack and the punters are betting on the favourite, but I still want to punt on number 7 because it’s a lucky number or number 6 because it’s called Son’s life. Something deep inside me keeps whispering ‘it’s anyone race’. Well, like any gambler down to his last ten bucks, I decide to have an each way bet. I’ll do the scans and think about the rest later when the results are back.

Copyright Sonya Green 2008 www.reinventingmyself.com
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