"Blog Fever" comin' on strong

I just re-read my entry from a week ago. Big anxieties, hah!

Not three days after that was written, I learned I have cancer again. That puts the anxiety list of a week ago in an entirely new perspective. (And I took those damned pills I hated for nothing for three years, I guess>

Those of you who followed me during the last bout in 2007 will remember that I blogged my way through. I love to write and I hate the telephone, so blogging is the preferred way to express my anxieties, chronicle events for my own records, and keep people updated so I don’t have to tell the same stories over and over and over.




(It’s likely over the next few months that if you ask me where I am in the process, I will deliver a dirty look. The look means “READ MY BLOG.” …Got it?)

Here’s what I know so far.

I noticed a lump near the left mastectomy scar about ten days ago. I chose to just worry about it for a few days, then after a sleepless night, got on the phone the next day and made great progress. Had an exam with Radiology-Oncology, got an ultrasound, had an attempted aspiration of what we hoped might be a common cyst, and failing that had a brand new procedure, vacuum-assisted biopsy. Here’s where the radiologist had to call in a cohort, as he’d only used the new tool one another time and wanted to make sure he was doing it right. (I love new procedures!) The tool is a combination “saw” and vacuum. It cuts into the tissue until it has a goodly chunk, then a button is pressed and the vacuum sucks the tissue “noodle” through a 2-foot hose into a specimen jar. It was a very strange sensation, trust me.

Results the next day showed cancer, so I was granted a consult with my chosen surgeon, someone I’d met through my work with the breast cancer “treatment process improvement team” (my health providers) the past three years.

She pointed out what we hadn’t anticipated: my new cancer appears unrelated to the cancer of 2007 based on location and characteristics thus far analyzed.

Thus I am on an altered diet today and tomorrow in preparation for a head-to-toe PET scan on Wednesday to see if there is evidence of cancer anywhere else. The order of treatment and surgery is to be determined once those results are in.

For now, I feel great and won’t waste a minute of feeling-great time. My sister’s in town from Texas and my brother from Marshfield is coming to hang out with us today. It may be exceptionally cold here for this time of year, but my daffodils don’t seem to care and the sun is rising, so attitude today: 10 out of 10.