Hope, Healing, and the Road Ahead

Second row at The National Parks concert = SO MUCH FUN!!!  Recovery from the double lumpectomy last week has been relatively pain free and smooth. I took Monday after surgery off but was back to work on Tuesday. I’m incredibly grateful to the friends and family who have continued to check-in, brought a meal, stopped by to visit, and sent board games (my friends know me well!). I took it easy for most of the week, passing the time outside of work playing games, reading, and taking a trip to White Sulphur Springs this past weekend for the Red Ants Pants Festival. I’m not supposed to lift anything more than 5 pounds for four weeks, so Dory got stuck with most of the camp chores! I honestly feel fine, so it’s hard to remember to follow the doctor’s orders!  

I was jazzed for surgery day! When we left the house, I told my mom and Dory that I felt like I was off to a sporting competition. The last three months have been an em otional roller coaster, and I’ve certainly had my low points. On surgery day though, I felt healthy, strong, confident and ready to kick cancer’s ass!    I checked in at 10 am and headed into pre-op. I changed into a hospital gown and had my blood work done. At 11 am, Rex f rom nuclear medicine stopped by. I met him two days prior during the seed placement procedure . While lying in a hospital bed, he wheeled me into the elevator, and we headed to the basement of the hospital and entered a secure room through a door plastered with signs warning of radioactivity .   This was the strangest part of my medical journey thus far. I was lying on a hospital bed in the middle of what felt like a very random room in a basement—it wasn’t an exam room. There were coats hanging on the rack near the door. Th...

Two days before my surgery I was back at the imaging center for my “seed placement” and an ultrasound of the left axillary area. As I described in a previous post, s eed placement is also known as radioactive seed localization (RSL). It is a technique used in breast surgery to pinpoint the exact location of a tumor. The seed (about the size of a sesame seed) helps the surgeon precisely locate and remove the tumor and minimizes the removal of healthy tissue.    The radiologist used an ultrasound to insert the see d in the right breast. Because of the challenges in locating the tumor in the left breast, a mammogram guided placement was used in that breast. Essentially, I sat in a high platform chair and was wheeled up to the mammogram machine while the radiologist located the tumor and then inserted the seed via a thin needle. There were three ultrasound techs, the radiologist and me in the room —it felt like a crowd, but everyone seemed to have a job to do.   ...

After discovering during my MRI that the marker from the biopsy of my left breast didn’t actually sample the suspicious tissue , my surgeon ordered a follow-up biopsy. T he radiologist who did the MRI recommended a mammogram guided biopsy. The first biopsy was done by ultrasound. My surgeon also ordered a scan of my left axillary area to check on t he lymph nodes in that area as that is where the cancer tends to spread first.    The imaging appointment was with a radiologist I had not worked with before and it did not go as I expected. Rather than a guided mammogram biopsy, another ultrasound guided biopsy was done , and I never received a scan of my left axillary area. I left that appointment feeling really confused and frustrated .     The appointment was on July 2 nd and because of the holiday weekend , the results didn’t arrive until July 8th. And for the second time , the biopsy missed the tumor in my left breast . By the end of the day af...