Surgery day: Neil's side of the story.

At first, the morning seemed just like any other. Marie did not seem at all nervous or uneasy about what was about to happen.  She just worked through her morning routine checklist, same as always.

Get up. (Check)

Shower. (Check)

Tell Neil to get up. (Check)

Lay out the kids clothes. (Check)

Tell Neil to hurry because we have to leave in x amount of minutes. (Check)

Get dressed. (Check)

Make sure Neil is still moving. (Check)

Go warm up the car. (Check)

Go back in the house and get Neil. (Check)

Normal day.

We arrived at the Huntsman Hospital only a couple of minutes late.  I always figure in “doctor making you wait time,” so it’s kind of pointless to be early. Besides, really, can they start without her? The valet took the vehicle and swiftly drove away. I love valet parking. For a brief moment I can pretend that I am somebody. 

We made our way to the third floor and the nurse escorted us to a large, open room with smaller, curtained off areas.  We are guided to the corner in front of these very large windows for Marie to change in front of.  Are you kidding me?  Do they charge a peep fee on the other side?  The curtain did not even pull all the way closed and two people were sitting just across the way.  This was all very odd to me but Marie just took it in stride.  She changed and listened to all the instructions well.  I only heard bits and pieces because I was still recovering from an ear infection and was dealing with a decent amount of hearing loss.  I was nervous was going to miss something.

The first person from the medical team was Dr. Neumayer’s assistant Victoria. She came in our small curtained area and explained everything very well.  Then she marked the areas on Marie that they would be doing the procedures on.  Again, as I looked at Marie I saw she was handling it all very well. I am somebody who always worries about the “what ifs,” so I did my best to keep everything inside and maintain a positive front as much as possible.

After talking with Victoria, Marie went to the restroom, but never returned.  I waited and waited and waited.  I considered grabbing a nurse and asking them to check on her because she had been gone now for about twenty minutes or more.  I knew she had to pee in a cup, but was afraid she was freaking out. I wanted a nurse to go find her and tell her everything would be fine. Apparently no one bothered to tell me that they had intercepted her on her way back from the bathroom to take her down to have her wire put in for the surgery.  What a relief to discover she was not passed out on the bathroom floor and that I didn’t actually end up looking like an idiot because I sent nurses off looking for her.

From the curtained area we made our way to a private room with a television.  They seem to have nurses for everything. A new nurse came in and had Marie complete the “what if” paperwork. You know, do you have a living will? What do we do with remains? etc. etc. Okay maybe it wasn’t that drastic, but it was close. Then this nurse put in the IV. After she was done, the anesthesiologist also came in and discussed the “what ifs.” I am thinking this room should now be called the “enter if you dare room.”  Like the old movies.  Dun, dun daahhhhh.

After the anesthesiologist was done, they wheeled her out and that was the last I saw of her until it was all over.  I now was left to my own devices.  They left me standing there to find my way out to the waiting room.  Once in the waiting room, I checked in at the desk. They gave me a card that coincided with a LCD panel where I could watch Marie’s progress as she went from pre-op, to surgery, post-op and so on.  It really is a nice system and somehow makes you feel a little comforted.

I went down to the pharmacy to get her prescription filled. While I was there, my phone made the loud ringing sound it makes when I’ve missed a call.  It must have been ringing the whole time I was standing there. I am sure people were looking at me and thinking, “Are you going to answer it?”  I asked the pharmacist if the number was from the hospital and she said yes.  Of course, my first thought was that they had found something and I now had to make a split decision on what to do.  What would Marie want me to do? Did we talk about it? Man, what if she brought it up in one of those conversations that she went on and on and I was zoned out.  What if I made the wrong decision? I could not live with that.  I really need to listen better. I better get up stairs.

My hands were clammy as I approached the front desk.  I told them that somebody called me, but I missed the call.  I am sure they were thinking, “What a loser. What was so important that he could not take a call about his wife in surgery?” Thankfully they didn’t say that out loud, they just said that it had probably been the operating room and they would call back to surgery to get the message for me. Great. (Yes, please, could you interrupt my wife’s surgery because I could not hear my cell phone ring?)  I am an idiot.  The receptionist handed me the phone and said the nurse wanted to talk to me. A cute, perky voice is on the other side. “Mr. Erickson?” It takes me a moment to register who “Mr. Erickson” is. It’s me, not some old guy I am unfamiliar with. I respond slowly, “y e s.”  She cheerfully gives me the news that the test on the lymph nodes was negative and they were now proceeding with the surgery and it should be about an hour and half. I am only mildly relieved because we still have the rest of the surgery to go.  I need drugs. 

I decided to go up to the “Point.” Its a restaurant on the sixth floor of the hospital. I needed refreshment and a cookie. I brought a movie to watch to pass time because I do not wait well, especially by myself.  Choosing a soda was no problem. Pepsi or Coke. But when it came to a cookie, I crumbled.  Do I want a snickerdoodle? Calming cinnamon and sugar, melt-in-your-mouth? Or maybe an M&M chocolate chip cookie? Fun with a smile? Or, a frosted green sugar cookie? It just exudes spring, happiness and sunshine and makes you want to giggle when you eat it? And finally, the lemon cookie. Bits of lemon drops crushed inside with a tart icing drizzled on top that gives you an instant sugar rush and a hug from your grandma with each bite.  How do I decide? I can’t decide. My mind is not here. Give me all four. If the over the counter drugs won’t do it, the sugar will.

A few minutes later and I’m back in the waiting room, checking out the board. There is a line that runs down the middle of the screen to mark the patients’ progress. I do not think Marie has moved.  I wander about the waiting area. I think I was making a few of the people nervous. A few of them tried to speak to me, but of course I could not hear them.  Looking back, I think they must have assumed that I was anxiously pacing back and forth waiting for the surgery to be over and just wanted to help in some way, but all I was really doing was looking for was a plug, an electrical plug. I needed to plug in my computer, watch a movie, and get my mind off things.  I finally found one, but it was buried in the carpet. I needed that movie, so I got down on all fours and pried off the cover. We have contact.  I sat down and watched the movie. Then the monitor. Then the movie. Then the monitor. Then the movie. The monitor was still saying she was in surgery when I looked up and saw Dr. Neumeyer standing in front of me. I was excited to see her. I quickly closed my computer, and she sat down beside me with a handful of grapes.

She told me everything went well.  She mentioned the lymph nodes again and said that when she removed the breast tissue that it just looked like normal breast tissue. I tried to think of questions to ask but was just more relieved than anything. In the back of my mind, I just kept thinking that everyone so far in my life that has been diagnosed with cancer has died. There has been a number of family and friends that I have had to say goodbye to, but Marie will be the first to live. I will be able to grow old and raise our children with her.  For this one moment I believe the Lord really was listening to my one prayer. 

I asked about recovery and how long it would take but I’m not sure I was really listening to the answer.  Dr. Neumeyer left and sat silently waiting until I could go back to recovery to see Marie. Again my phone beeped loudly, I missed the call.  I walked up to the desk, looked at the receptionist and said, “I really cannot hear my phone.”  She was sweet and said, “Would you like them to call me so that I can come get you?”  I gratefully accepted and she dialed the nurse. They told me Marie was in recovery, but was having a hard time waking up. It would be another 45 minutes and then they would move her back to the to the private room we started in and I would be able to come back.

I told the receptionist that I was going to go to the pharmacy to pick up Marie’s medication since it would be awhile. When I got there the pharmacist handed me Marie’s medication but told me not to give it to her as it was prescribed. She said, “If you give it to her in these doses, it will blow her liver out. We would not want that to happen.” Apparently the prescription was written wrong. She tried to contact the doctor to correct but could not get a hold of her.

When I got back to the waiting room, I was just about to sit down when I saw the receptionist jumping up and down and pointing to me and then the doors. I do not think she would have done well in charades, but I got the message. She was sweet all the same. I went back to find Marie. She was back in the “enter if you dare” room. She was hooked up to an oxygen monitor.  Meagan, my niece, called to check at the same time the nurse walked in. I quickly told her that the nurse was there so I had to go. I am sure I sounded more like, “Get off the damn phone, the nurse is here,” but that was not my intention. 

The nurse explained to me how the oxygen monitor worked and that it had to stay above 90.  When it dropped I had to tell Marie to take deep breaths or even cough.  Marie just wanted to sleep and told the nurse that but the nurse wasn’t buying it.  She wanted her out of there.  I tried to ask questions that I thought Marie would ask. I asked about her questionable prescription. She thought this was concerning.  Marie is so good at asking questions and researching things.  When I had surgery she could tell the doctors and nurses a thing or two. I think some of them had to go back to their stations and look stuff up just to come back and answer her questions.

Well I tried to keep my head. “Marie you need to take some breaths.”  Her response: “I AM BREATHING.”

“Marie just a couple more.”

“WHAT, YOU WANT ME TO GASP FOR BREATH?”

“Marie you are almost there.”

“THAT THING IS NOT WORKING!”

“Okay, I think you are close enough.”

I decided to call Meagan back and just quickly update her. 

“Hi, Meagan, yeah, she is doing okay just a little ornery.”

“I AM NOT ORNERY!”

”Thanks, Meagan. I’ll talk to you later.”

Marie started waking up a little now and was asking questions. The same questions again and again. “How many lymph nodes did they take?” Crap. That is a good question. I forgot to ask that question. “Umm, I do not know.” A few minutes later, “How many lymph nodes did they take?” I answer with same lame response. Just to make me feel worse she asks two more times. I can not remember the other two questions she kept asking over and over. I think it is time to go home.

I wheel her to the front door and out to valet service. Just as I am about to hand the valet my ticket, this elderly women darts by me, holding out hers.  Marie is sitting in a chair almost comatose, slumped over with her coat over her.  Yes, some privileges come with being elderly, but I think she was stretching it a bit. Since Marie was cold, I wheeled her around and back into the building with the assistance of another woman, who was much more pleasant than the first. Maybe she saw what happened and was trying to make up for the first woman. I walked back outside to wait for the next one.  

We got in the car and started pulling out when Marie yells, “YOUR PHONE IS RINGING!” I really could not hear my phone ring. It was driving me crazy. It is the nurse. She was still concerned about the medication and didn’t want to send us home with the wrong label. She asked me to meet her at the pharmacy so that she could fix it.  So I left Marie in the car, in the hospital round about, only semi-conscious as ran up to pharmacy.  There was a different pharmacist so I quickly tried to explain the situation. Her response was, “We cannot take these back.”  I said, “I am not trying to give them back. They just need a new label.” She responded, “But we cannot take back medication once it is dispensed.”  I must not explain myself very well.  At that moment the nurse arrives and clears things up. Then the doctor called and after all that, just said, “Just send him home with the bottle as long as they understand not to take it the way it is written.”  Fine. My wife is comatose in the car. I need to get her home.

On the way home Marie did pretty good, we only pulled over twice because she thought she was going to be sick. The first time I pulled over was quick because she said, “Neil, pull over right now, I am going to be sick.” Once I was at a stop she said, “Why did you stop here? You’re in the middle of the road. You’re going to get hit. You better move, a bus is coming.”  I can’t win. I pull back onto the road and try again a few blocks later.  The second time I guess I was appropriately stopped.

When we got home she made it safely to her bed and slept most of the day. I woke her up to make sure she ate something, but she went right back to sleep. I am so relieved she is doing so well and seems to be handling the pain without any problem.

I would be amiss if I did not thank all our friends and family who have done so much for us.  You brought in food, words of encouragement, love and support. In case we have not already said it, and even if we have, thank you so much. For everything.   Now on to the next adventure…

Have I already mentioned that I love Percocet?

It's the day after and I'm conscious. I'll try to relate yesterday's events to the best of my ability since part of the day is a bit of a fog at best and a complete hole of nothingness at worst, then I'll try to persuade Neil to do a guest post to fill in the holes of the parts I slept through.

We got up bright and early because we needed to be there by 7:30. Our friend Darlene was an angel and came over to spend the day with the kids. When we got there, we went into a staging area of sorts with lots of beds with curtains around them. Mine was right up against the exterior windows. For those of you who don't know where the Huntsman Hospital is, it is right up on the bench of the mountains. The view was beautiful. Anyway, one of the nurses gave me a gown and bag to put my clothes in. I think Neil wanted to ask for a more private area for me to change in (someplace where we weren't right in front of a window and with a privacy curtain that actually closed all the way), but I've long since lost all sense of modesty and just proceeded to strip down and put on the breezy little hospital gown.

When I was done, Dr. Neumayer's surgical nurse, Victoria, came in to go over some paperwork with me, make sure I knew exactly why I was there and what they were going to do, and to mark me up with a sharpie. They wrote a little "yes" on all the places they were going to cut: right breast around where the tumor was, right armpit where they were removing lymph nodes, and left forearm where I had an unusual, unexplained mass that had decreased significantly during chemo. (more about that later.)

After Victoria left, another nurse came in and gave me a little plastic cup for a urine sample. Then she stepped back and just kind of looked at me. I was confused. I finally just said, "You want me to do it right here?"  "Oh, no!" she says, "lets find a restroom." Thank heavens. I guess I do have a little bit of that sense of modesty left.

After I'd given my sample, I had to go to mammography to have the wire inserted. Since there was no tumor left, Dr. Neumayer needed something to guide her to where it had been so they were going to insert a little wire through the breast that went directly to the little metal marker that had been inserted in the middle of the tumor. Then during surgery, Dr. Neumayer would cut out a cylinder of tissue all around the wire. In order to insert the wire, they had to see where the marker was. So they took me in to have another mammogram. They would use the image on the mammogram screen to help them insert the wire where it needed to go. They explained how exactly this was going to work but I think once I realized that it was going to be inserted while I was in compression, I kind of blocked everything else out. It wasn't the wire being shoved in that bothered me. The distressing part of this was that I had to be in compression while they did it. For those of you who have had a mammogram, you know that they are not anywhere near comfortable, but they are bearable because you are only squished as flat as a pancake for a few seconds. Well imagine them putting one of the girls in compression, FULL COMPRESSION, and then leaving her there for five minutes. That's how long they told me it would take. I think she got the message that I was not okay with this when my mouth dropped open and then me saying, just a little louder than I probably should have, "FIVE MINUTES!!!!! ARE YOU KIDDING ME???"

Needless to say, I didn't even feel the wire go in. I was to busy screaming in my head about the fact that my boob was literally being smashed to death. By the time they were done I was amazed that there was anything left for them to cut out. Believe it or not, that was the worst part of the whole day.

Once the wire was in and set, they took me to another little room where Dr. Neumayer injected into the breast a "radiolabeled" fluid. That's a slightly less alarming term than "radioactive," but they mean about the same thing. The reason for this is that they were trying to identify which of the 60 or so lymph nodes under my arm was the "sentinel" lymph node, or the node that the breast drained to first. If there was cancer in any of the nodes, it would be in the sentinel lymph node. In surgery, using a sort of modified geiger counter, they can identify which nodes had most of the radiolabeled fluid and remove them for testing. If there is no cancer in those, they don't need to remove any more. If they do find cancer, then they will usually remove several more to make sure they have gotten out all the nodes that contained any cancer cells. The fluid she injected burned going in. It felt like they were injecting hot sauce, but still, it was cake compared to the above mentioned boob-squishing incident.

After I was done with the boob-squishing and radioactive fluid injecting procedures, they moved me into my own private little room to wait for surgery to be ready for me. It would also be where they wheeled me after I came out of surgery too. I think it was anyway. While I was there, a nurse came in to put in my IV and my anethstesiologists also came in to tell me everything that could happen due to the anethstesia: stroke, heart failure, and a bunch of other things I can't remember. I wonder if they've ever had anyone back out after hearing all that. At least one of them said, "But just so you know, it's more likely that you will die in a car accident once you've left the hospital than it is for any of these things to happen during surgery." I wasn't sure what to say to that.

Then they wheeled me into the operating room and had me move over to the operating table. I remember noticing green lights above me. That was odd. They said they were going to put a breathing tube down my throat, but they must have put it in and taken it out while I was still under because I don't remember any of it.

Once I was all toasty under warm blankets, they put a mask over my face and told me to breathe deeply. The next thing I know, some lady is telling me to wake up and I'm thinking, "Why is she bugging me, doesn't she know I'm about to have surgery?" I just decided to ignore her. Then she says, "I need you to at least open your eyes so I know that you can." I opened one eye, looked at her, and then shut it again. A little while later I hear her talking--I think she must be talking on the phone to Neil--she says, "She's fine. She's been in recovery for about 45 minutes, but we're having a hard time getting her to wake up."  What?!? I'm done? So then I open my eyes and they decide they can wheel me back into my little room where Neil is waiting.

I think I was in that room for a while. I was really tired and just wanted everyone to leave me alone so I could go back to sleep but someone kept telling me to breathe because my oxygen was low. Then she left and neil started telling me to breathe. I just kept saying, "I AM BREATHING!!!!" I just wanted to go back to sleep. It was funny though because I remember thinking, "I don't need to breathe." Usually when you don't breathe you start to feel pain in your chest and gasp for air. I didn't. I didn't feel the need to breathe, but they kept bugging me to breathe so I did every now and then. Anything so they would just let me go back to sleep.

I guess they decided I finally had enough oxygen in my blood because they got me a wheel chair and Neil wheeled me out to the car. I was no longer in the hospital gown though so I must have gotten dressed at some point. My IV was gone too. Don't remember when that happened.

So we drive home, go in the house, I say hi to Darlene and the kids and then just walk into the bedroom, lie down and.... I'm gone.  I vaguely remember Neil coming in to give me drugs and food. I also remember Lily, at some point, pounding on the bedroom door yelling, "MomMA! MomMA!" I heard voices now and then, but that's about it. Next thing I know, it's 8 pm. I think we got home about 3:00 in the afternoon. I had Neil put Lily in bed with me and I slept until 7:30 this morning, only getting up ocassionally to take some more lovely Percocet and to throw Lily's legs off my face. I slept like the dead.

So, anyway, today is Saturday. The cleaning ladies came to clean this morning, my angel neice took Elijah and Lily for an all day play date, and my neighbors brought over dinner last night with dessert. So, my house is clean, quiet, and stocked with brownies.  Life is beautiful.

Oh, I suppose I should also say that they won't have definitive pathologial results until they can do more thorough testing that won't be complete for about another week, but according to the initial tests, they found absolutely no cancer cells anywhere in the breast tissue, none in the lymph nodes, and none in the weird, unexplained mass in my arm.

Complete pathological response was what I was going for. Won't know for sure until testing is finished, but it's definitely looking good.

Tomorrow's the day!

So I got the final word from my surgeon. She took my case to the "Tumor Board." All the doctors get together once a week to discuss particular patients and decide on a plan of action. Apparently they were all okay with the lumpectomy now, bilateral mastectomy later idea so we're on for tomorrow.

We'll be doing a lumpectomy, sentinel node dissection, and removing this little suspicious lump thingy out of my arm while they're in there. There's all sorts of details I need to put down here, but I'm tired and have to get up early for my appointment so I think I'll just post all that later this weekend.

Someone asked me today if I was scared. It hadn't occurred to me to be scared. The only thing that I keep thinking about since my nurse told me that I would be under general anethstesia was that I was really looking forward to a good nap. It's been a while since I've had one of those. This is how clueless I am. Oh well. I guess ignorance isn't always a bad thing.

A change of plans

So my surgeons have been "discussing." Dr. Massey (plastic surgeon) called Dr. Neumayer (breast surgeon) to strategize and then Dr. Neumayer called me to give me another option. After my first consult with Dr. Neumayer, I left planning on having a bilateral mastectomy on the 18th, having tissue expanders inserted and then reconstruction at a later date. After speaking with Dr. Massey the first time, I had decided to have only a unilateral mastectomy on the 18th and then have the other breast removed at the same time that I have reconstruction. That way I would only have to deal with the discomfort of one tissue expander instead of two. But, now they were suggesting that on the 18th I have only a lumpectomy, go through radiation, wait my six months and then meet with Dr. Massey to have both breasts removed and reconstruction in the same surgery. They thought this would be a good way of me avoiding the tissue expanders altogether.

If my reconstruction was being done in the same surgery as the mastectomy, tissue expanders wouldn't be necessary, but since there will be a period of approximately 7 months between surgeries (thanks to radiation), the tissue expanders act as place holders of sorts. Dr. Neumayer does a total skin sparing, nipple sparing mastectomy, so they need to put something in there to replace the breast tissue that was removed until it can be replaced with natural tissue from you butt or gut at the time of reconstruction.

The uncomfortable part is that they have to put the expander underneath the muscle wall (the breast tissue usually rests on top of the muscle wall). Then they slowly inflate the expander, stretching the muscle to form a breast mound. After several weeks of stretching (ouch!) they pull out the expanders and put in implants. But I'm not using implants. I have now finally identified one good thing that has come of being on super doses of steroids for more than a year: I have plenty of my own natural tissue to use so I don't have to put in implants. Plenty. Enough to share even. So, if there are any skinny women out there that are in need of breast reconstruction and are uncomfortable with the idea of implants, I'd be happy to volunteer as a donor. Dr. Massey asked me which area of my body I would like her to take the tissue from. I just told her to take her pick.

So anyway. I think that is the plan. For now anyway. Doing a lumpectomy now and saving everything for later so I can do everything at the same time will save me in a lot of ways. I'll be combining two major surgeries into one. That should cut back on recovery time, time off work, and keep the number of days that I have lifting restrictions to a  minimum. (Not sure how I'm going to survive six plus weeks of a toddler hanging on to my legs screaming "UP PEEES!  UP PEEES!" without being able to pick her up.)

So that's the latest. I think I've figured out what I'm doing. One way or another, I'm having some sort of surgery on Friday. 

I tested negative.

I got the results back from my genetic testing. They were negative. So, this is good for a few different reasons. One, testing postive would have meant that there there was a 50 to 80 percent risk of me developing cancer in the other breast eventually, necessitating a bilateral mastectomy instead of a unilateral. This doesn't actually change much for me since I'm pretty sure I'm going with bilateral anyway. Two, a positive would have meant I had a really high risk of ovarian cancer in the future. If it had been positive, I would have had to have my ovaries removed at some point in the very near future. That I wouldn't care too much about either at this point, other than it would be just one more surgery. Three, and this is the one that I was most interested in, a negative means that my daughter and sisters and neices and maybe even cousins are probably also negative meaning they don't have to worry about having mammograms and breast MRIs at 25 years old.

So, I'm glad I did it. Hopefully it brings a little peace of mind to some of my family members as well.

I have a plastic surgeon. Crazy.

I had a consultation with my plastic surgeon last week. Her name is Marga Massey. I love her. Honestly, it seems like I've been saying that about all my doctors, but I really have been really lucky to find some amazing specialists. Several years ago, when Neil got sick, it seemed like we had to go through at least 5 idiots for every 1 doctor that was even semi-helpful. But then, he was seeing neurologists and neurosurgeons. I'm seeing oncologists and cancer surgeons. I think we learned that Utah is not a great place to be if you have neurological issues, but it's one of the best places to be if you have Cancer.

Anyway, my plastic surgeon does consults in Salt Lake, but her surgeries are done in New Orleans, South Carolina and sometimes Chicago. My consultation with her was over the phone. When making the arrangements, I asked her assistant, "How exactly is that going to work? Doesn't she need to see... stuff?" "Oh yes," she replies, "we're going to need pictures. Neck to knee, front and back." Pictures?!?!  So I took some pictures of myself. Thank heavens for self timers on cameras. I think it is safe to say that was the singlemost depressing moment of my life.... When I was done and had given her the copies I burned onto a CD for her, I deleted them from my camera. Then, just to be safe, I reformatted my memory card. Then, it was all I could do not to run my computer down to the local techie shop and have the entire hard drive wiped, reformatted, and reimaged. But I didn't. However, I will personally be burning that particular computer when we end up replacing it with a new one. . . just to be sure... Bonfire. In the backyard. Seriously.

I met Dr. Massey at a dinner for the Young Survivor Sisters. They have one every year and Dr. Massey sponsors it. She spoke for a few minutes about her work to develop a procedure of transplanting lymph nodes to alleviate symptoms of Lymphedema, which often develops in cancer patients who have undergone mastectomies where they had lymph nodes removed. It's pretty amazing actually.

Just as a little side note, at that same dinner, a woman named Linda Hill spoke. She was named 2010's Wasatch Woman of the Year. She told us her story, beginning with when she was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor in her chest at the age of 19. It was growing around her windpipe, slowly suffocating her to death. She underwent the full gammet of cancer treatment. Since that time, she has continued to battle with various forms of cancer. She has gone through chemotherapy 4 times and has had various surgeries. She has had her thyroid removed, ovaries removed, breasts removed, and colon removed. After explaining all that she stopped and we were all just looking at her in awe at how she survived all that, but she just continued by saying, "And I'm fine!!. You people are walking around with a whole lot of crap that you don't need!" It was a really nice evening and she really gave us a lot of things to think about to keep the whole cancer thing in perspective. She was amazing. If I hadn't felt like a whiney baby about my health lot in life before I heard her speak, I certainly did after. And somehow in the middle of that she managed to have 7 children. Yikes.

Anyway, back to Dr. Massey. She helped me figure a few things out. It helps that she is good friends with Dr. Neumayer, the surgeon that will be doing my mastectomy. She said that they would get together over the phone and discuss the particulars before she got back to me, but generally I think I've decided to do a single mastectomy on the 18th and have a skin expander inserted (more details on that one later). Then by the time I am ready for reconstruction, Dr. Massey will remove the expander in the cancer breast as well as perform a mastectomy on the other breast and reconstruct both breasts at the same time. Still up in the air over whether or not I'll be doing radiation. So that's where I'm at so far.

"No visual residual tumor."

I got the report from my last breast MRI. Here's what it said with my comments inserted:

"No abnormal enhancement is visualized in the right breast. Susceptibility artifact from biopsy clip in the central breast is noted. [A susceptibility artifact is just bright or dark areas of spatial distortion on the MRI image that occur as the result of variations in the magnetic field strength due to the presence of a substance of different magnetic susceptibility. Simply put, the little metal marker clip they inserted in the tumor before all my treatment began was causing some minor distortions in the images in the area directly surrounding it.]  The findings are consistant with response to neoadjuvant [this fun word just means that the chemo came before surgery]chemotherapy, with no visible residual tumor.

That last part is my favorite. Again, that doesn't mean that the Cancer is completely gone on a cellular level (though here's hoping that it is), just that there is no visual trace of it on a MRI. WooHOOO! So now I just need the pathology report after surgery to come back clean and we can skip radiation, move on to reconstruction and be done with this for a while.

I have a consult with my plastic surgeon in a couple of days (now there is something that I never thought I'd have to say) so I'll get a little more information about next steps then.