Follow Up Time... Thank God for Women's Intuitions and Good Decisions!

Tuesday and Wednesday after surgery, not much happening.  Living, literally, in my wonderful fluffy lift chair.  Popping the happy pills every 4 hours, can't let the pain catch me.  I am amazingly blessed by a wonderful fiancé, aka my murse, and my mom.  Between the two of them I am able to recover without lifting a finger.  I cannot begin to explain how lucky and blessed I am to have an army of people surrounding me, praying for me, visiting me, bringing me all kinds of GREAT food.  The love I have felt since this horrible thing reared it's ugly head is amazing!  I read other people's posts on some of my cancer support pages that have absolutely no one to help them.  Not even a friend to drive them to appointments.  I cannot even imagine going through this journey alone and without a single person for support.  These women are total rock stars and my heroes for fighting this thing with all their strength and doing it alone.  I am in this battle with an entire army.  For this I am so very lucky! I do not believe I could be so strong as the ones doing this alone or with small children.  Again, total rock stars!

Thursday morning... time for my first post op appointment with my surgeon.  Maybe I'll get the drains out!  Yay! Into the office we go. Check in.  Oh woo hoo, no $20 today.  So far this appointment is going good haha!  Head into the room to see the doc.  She comes in and says my pathology report is already back.  Wow I hadn't expected this already.  I'm still so confused how some pathology is back so fast and others take forever, and it seems like the forever ones are the ones that you are usually freaking out about the most.  I just don't get it.

Pathology report basically is this:  First and foremost all clear margins!!  Yay!  Thankful!!  Next bit of news leaves my fiancé and I both pretty dumbfounded and grateful, the "naughty" boob was actually full of cancer, the lobular kind, which is the sneaky little bastard that likes to hide from imagery and scans, and it even had made it's way into the nipple.  If you didn't remember, my original mammogram and diagnosis was a 4mm tumor.  We are now up and over a 3cm tumor, none of which had been detected on the mammogram!  I had the choice, after my first lumpectomy with no clear margins, to have a 2nd lumpectomy to try to get clear margins or to go ahead and do the mastectomy.  Had I chose the 2nd lumpectomy, I would have ended up having to have the mastectomy after all because they would not have been able to clear margins without removing the whole boob.  AND there was also the beginnings of pre-cancer in the "good" boob, which I just chose to remove due to my BRCA2 status and the chance of recurrence with the BRCA2.  My surgeon's exact words "you made a very good decision".  Making me once again confident that everyone should always listen to your intuitions and make the decisions for yourself, even if they are hard and sometimes you just don't want to do it.  It is your body and you know it better than anyone. Also, I had failed to mention in my prior post, but the other pathology report I had been waiting on and was going crazy over had came back while I was in the hospital the day after my mastectomy.  (Might have been a little fuzzy then haha) My surgeon took time out of her evening, on a weekend, to bring the test to me personally.  She was excited to finally bring me some good news.  This is why I love her and have put my full confidence and faith in her, as she truly cares about her patients.  My oncotype, which is a pathology report that shows how aggressive the tumor is and how likely it would be that this particular cancer would come back.  It scores 0-100, with 0 being the best and 100 the worst.  Mine was a 10!!! I almost cried I was so happy to finally have a second bit of good news on this journey.

After the pathology chat, she decides the left drain is ready to come out, but the right isn't yet.  She has me lay down on the table after she removes my bandages, and says, this will sting a little but that's it.  Has me take a deep breath and blow out.  As I'm blowing out she is pulling out the drain, for what seemed to be going on forever.  How long is this thing.  Now let me tell you what people, I'm not going to even sugar coat it, it hurt like HELL. A little sting my ass...  Don is there with me, of course, as he is for every single one of my appointments, because he is a saint!  He is amazed and tells me after we leave the office that there was like 10-12 inches of this tubing shit up inside my chest.  I had NO clue!  Again did I mention it hurt like hell.  Just making sure.  Put some gauze over what I am only assuming is a giant massive hole in my chest (remember crazy chick with the most amazing imagination LOL) and re-bandaged me up again.  Said she would see me next Wednesday to get the other one out.  Well everyone who knows me well knows this is now the beginning of panic week for me, thinking about having the other 85 foot cord ripped out of me next week.  Game plan now being put in place for next week's appointment....  2 Xanax and 2 Percocet.  My Murse might be utilizing the wheel chairs at the front door for this appointment 'cause this chick ain't going in for that torture "sober" again!