One year ago, I was recovering from a "generous lumpectomy" and removal of 17 lymph nodes from under my arm. And the week after Thanksgiving, I started chemotherapy.
A few weeks ago I had a mammogram. It was the first since I was diagnosed with and treated for breast cancer.
I was nervous about getting the results. I contacted my oncologist and asked him to call me with them, thinking he'd contact me sooner than the usual method. I was not thinking that the results would be anything other than negative. I wanted that happy news as soon as possible.
Regardless, I got a voice mail on my cell phone from mammography, asking me to call back. I did, and whoever answered the phone stumbled around, saying, "The mammogram on your right breast was normal... let me read through this... on your left breast.... hmmm... there appears to be something that they want to take a closer look at...."
She was killing me. She was fumbling around. She was not following through on the information delivery method I thought I'd orchestrated.
She got the RN who'd left the message for me to call me back, and she was much better. No nonsense. "There appears to be an area of calcification near the surgery site."
I know what that means. I learned all about calcification last year. It means it could be early cancer and the only way to find out is by doing a biopsy.
A few days later, the spouse and I saw my oncologist. He said he thinks it's scar tissue, and that I had choices in how to proceed. I could have a biopsy, I could have an MRI or I could wait six months and have another mammogram.
I asked him what he would do. He said "I think for you, rather than worrying about it, you may want to have an ultrasound-guided biopsy." He showed us the mammogram images, and sure enough, there was a little solid white dot. He said an MRI wouldn't do much more than confirm that there was something there.
I thought about waiting six months and having another mammogram. I thought about how surprised I was last year to learn that not only did I have breast cancer, but it had spread to my lymph nodes. I thought that if that little dot is cancer, I didn't want to give the little shit the opportunity to spread, so I told my oncologist I wanted to do a biopsy.
I chose.
He wrote the orders for the procedure.
Later, when another RN called to prep me about the ultrasound-guided biopsy procedure, in the middle of our conversation she stopped herself and said "Hold on. The radiologist's recommendation is different from what your oncologist ordered." Apparently the radiologist had ordered a stereoscopic biopsy, a procedure invented in the middle ages and not improved upon since then. She said she'd call me back. When she did, she informed me that I needed the stereoscopic procedure, which involves laying on a cold stainless steel table with a hole in it for my breast to dangle into. Under the table, a mammogram machine and radiologist lay in wait. The torture begins, it goes on and on, and it's so uncomfortable that it should be banned.
But apparently it's the only way they can see and get at such a small little globule of misfortune.
There must be something in my chart that says I'm anxious, because she recommended that I take 1/2 a Lorazepam right before the procedure. She said it would help me tolerate the discomfort.
A year ago, I would have clung to her saying that like Kate Winslet clung to her whatever she was hanging onto in the freezing water at the end of Titanic.
I now know that when medical professionals say "discomfort" or "uncomfortable" it will indeed be everything those words imply.
I had been prescribed Lorazepam when I was getting chemotherapy. Chemo causes nausea, so they'd load me up with steroids to counteract the nausea. The steroids kept me awake, so they gave me the "beddy-by" Lorazepam to counteract the side effects from the medication that was counteracting side effects. As she was recommending this, I told her I still had some left, and wondered to myself, like a junkie, if two pills would be better than 1/2 of one. I want to keep my suffering to a minimum.
Last week I saw my naturopath. She was distressed to hear my news, and gave me some recommendations for supplements. One in particular I found interesting. She said that during a biopsy like the one I'm having, it's possible to drag cancer cells through healthy tissue as they're extracting the thingy that grabs the tissue samples. The supplement she recommended is supposed to stop that from happening. Magical thinking, perhaps, but I'm game.
I told her about the Lorazepam conversation and she said "I'd take two."
That's what I like about her.
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