Day 8 – My Healing Journey

It seemed like an eternity waiting for the day of the surgery but it finally arrived. My son and his wife had come out to help me through the situation. We went out for the proverbial “last supper”before the midnight cut off for no food and water so we took advantage of the situation and had a really nice meal together.

I was feeling a bit of trepidation being taken into the prep room and getting myself situated. Apparently the Universe had decided to provide me with the gift of another familiar face.

My anesthesiologist turned out to be a friend of my son; they had worked at the hospital together so now I had yet another wonderful person on my team.  That put me a little more at ease.

The surgery went well and she was able to remove both lumps along with the nipple, and took lymph node samples to make sure nothing had spread.

I was feeling pretty good with the pain blocker she had given me and was hungry so we all went to get Chinese food on the way home.  I was trying hard not to think about the decision I was going to have to make soon about my future treatment but I decided to wait until the results came back on the lymph nodes. 

Thankfully it was wonderful news, my stage 2+ cancer had been down graded to a 1+ and my lymph nodes were in great shape with no signs of cancer cells.

I was elated and extremely thankful and grateful for my surgeon. I let myself believe that it meant that I didn’t have to have chemotherapy after all but this was not the case.

The pathology reports came back and I met with my oncologist again to discuss how to move forward. She said that my scores on the additional testing meant that despite the lower staging of my type of cancer, it was highly recommended to do chemotherapy followed by radiation. She said that her initial belief that I would not need radiation had changed based on the test results.

I was feeling so hopeful, and so positive at that point that when she told me, I just broke down and cried. It was the last thing I wanted to hear, the last thing anyone wants to hear after originally thinking they had dodged a bullet.