Step One: Surgery

I had a lumpectomy last Thursday. It was pretty much a piece of cake. The worst parts were, in order of terribleness:

1. hearing the doctor say right afterward "we saw some cells in the lymph node that we thought might be abnormal" and also that I only had one sentinel node to remove. I was worried that with only one sentinel node, if it showed signs of cancer I would have to have more surgery to remove axillary nodes to see how far it had spread. And then waiting to find out how this was all going to play out through yet another weekend of sitting around.

2. pretty significant nausea the rest of the day secondary to the general anesthesia.

3. not being able to drink coffee in the morning until it was too late and then I had a caffeine withdrawal headache all afternoon.

4.the underarm pain from where they took my lymph node, which was still not bad enough to take anything stronger than Advil, but meant I could not take a shower by myself for the first couple of days because I couldn't lift my arms to wash my hair.

5. having to sleep in a bra for 4 nights.


On Monday I emailed my oncologist to find out results. On Monday night, he wrote back an email that I have read an estimated 427 times since then:

Molly
The pathology turned out showing a stage one tumor. You will receive the less aggressive chemotherapy for 12 weeks. You still need to wait a total of three weeks from your surgery. Let me know if you want to come and discuss before we start or just start around the three week mark?  Congratulations, that's the best news you could have had
Mike

I cannot believe it. I fully expected it to be in basically every location throughout my body. The next day, my surgeon called and confirmed those results, and said we had clean margins too, which is also important. The tumor was 1.6cm. And now it is gone, and I can breathe for the first time in weeks.

Chemo will start March 11th. I wish it was tomorrow but I guess I can wait.