If you haven’t yet read the previous posts about my cancer journey, you can start from the beginning right here.
We had to be at the hospital at 6:00 am for the MRI, so I think we woke up around 4:45. We had only a few hours of restless sleep and we were exhausted. Once again, I was thankful that God knew what we needed way before we did and the girls were having a long-planned sleepover with their grandma.
For some reason I could not stop crying this morning. All of the news we had received so far, while alarming, was still somewhat encouraging. We knew that I had the “good” kind of breast cancer, but I was so scared that the MRI would show something worse. I was a bundle of tears as the nurse prepped me for the MRI. The exam itself wasn’t bad (I have had an MRI before so I knew what to expect). When it was over, I once again asked when we would get the results. My husband texted the radiologist and he said that he had some procedures scheduled first thing in the morning, but he would read the study as soon as he could. We went home and waited.
I think it was around 10:00 am when the radiologist texted my husband and said he had looked at the scans and would be happy to go over them with us if we wanted to come up to the hospital right now. Yes please! We jumped in the car and went to the hospital. We arrived and went into the reading room for the radiologists and started looking at the MRI. There was good news and bad news. The good news was that absolutely nothing showed up in my left breast. That was a victory. However, there was a large (relatively speaking, I think around 5 cm) cloudy area in my right breast, separate from the smaller (1.3 cm) spot of cancer that had already been biopsied, and the radiologist didn’t know what it was. He had already asked his mentor (one of the leading breast imaging specialists in the country) her opinion and she didn’t have a good guess either.
I was so deflated. I so badly wanted for the MRI to show nothing more, and it didn’t happen. As hard as I tried to not let it, fear took over and I began imagining the worst. A second biopsy was now needed for the unknown area to find out what it was. I’m sure you know by now my next question. How soon can we do it? This was a Friday, and the radiologist’s schedule was full for the day. This next biopsy would be a different type than the first (I don’t recall the technical reasons why) and would require the use of the MRI machine. As I mentioned in my last post, the MRI machine was booked for months so after talking to the MRI tech and nurse, they both agreed to come in early (once again) on Monday morning and do my biopsy. It was officially scheduled for 7:00 am on the morning of Monday, August 10, 2015. Once again, God provided exactly what I needed.
As we were leaving the meeting with the radiologist around 11:15, he said that he had already talked to the breast surgeon at this hospital and he was willing to meet with us at 11:30 if we wished to discuss what we knew so far and what the implications were. How incredible is it that we were able to walk straight to the surgeon’s office and meet with him right away? God could have easily used this experience to teach me about patience and resting in Him, but he was gracious enough to deny me the agonizing waiting periods that He knows I struggle with.
We went to the surgeon’s office and discussed what we knew so far, which was that my left breast was clear, there was a 1.3 cm spot of DCIS in my right breast, and an unknown area of something also in my right breast. Because we didn’t know yet what the unknown area was, we could only discuss the DCIS. He explained to me that DCIS is a type of breast cancer that does not spread to any other parts of the body. It basically just sits in the breast and grows at a VERY slow rate. However, it needed to be removed, and it was small enough that a lumpectomy would suffice. That surgery would then be followed by 4-6 weeks of radiation therapy to kill any microscopic pieced of DCIS that may remain in the surrounding tissue. The lumpectomy would be a quick (1 hour) day surgery and I would pretty much be back to normal the next day. For the radiation therapy, it would take about 10 minutes, 5 days a week, and the main side effect would be fatigue.
My other option would be a single or double mastectomy, but if I chose either of those, it would be purely for emotional reasons. Current research does not show that my prognosis with either of these treatments would be better than it would with just the lumpectomy and radiation.
The surgeon reassured me that DCIS had a 99% survival rate (which we already knew) and I remember practically begging him for encouraging words about my prognosis. He reminded me that we still don’t know what the unknown area was, but that he was confident that, based on what we knew at the moment, I would be just fine. At this point I remembered something extremely important – my husband and I had a cruise ship to be on in 7 days!!! Our annual kid-free cruise on the Dream was the following week. We had purchased cruise insurance so I didn’t panic about possible losing the money, but I was beside myself that we may not be able to go on the cruise! I asked if we should go and the surgeon said by all means, there is no reason for you not to go and it would probably be the best thing for you right now. Whew! At least I finally received some good news!!! (We went, and you can read the trip report here).
I left that appointment feeling better than I had since before the first mammogram. I felt like a weight had been lifted, that this might not be such a big deal after all, and that I needed to just quit freaking about and be reasonable about the whole situation. This feeling lasted for only a brief period, until I remembered about the biopsy on Monday morning and worried about what it might reveal. I knew that I had 2.5 days to get through, so I focused as hard as I could on not letting fear take over.
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