SURGERY

I have a confession to make; I have never been under the knife. I haven’t even had anesthesia before except for those fun colonoscopies. I was very, very nervous. One of my favorite channels on TV is the Discovery Health channel. I love to watch all of the various medical mysteries and hospital dramas that occur. Suddenly I refused to even look at any medical program that dealt with anything more traumatic than a hangnail. All those horror stories were no longer exciting, funny how switching seats can make things a little too real. In the meantime I had meetings with both oncologists. I found out that my cancer was both estrogen and progesterone positive which was good. Also it was Her-2 negative which was also good. I work part time at the local library so I was able to clean the bookshelf of every book written on breast cancer. I was amazed how many there were. I began to read like crazy to help me understand all of these new terms. That was very helpful! Now that my literal life could be at stake, everything I read was riveting and far from boring.

The doctors recommended that I have an MRI before the scheduled surgery to make sure there were no other lesions because of the useless mammogram. I have never had an MRI but had heard that if one is claustrophobic, it can be a bit traumatic. Luckily I’m not and it went just fine other than how noisy it was because my earplugs fell out. It sounded like loud bangs and a jackhammer - which beats having one’s boob squished any day! I got the results after another fun wait and it showed no other problems. So my advice to all of the ladies in this audience is to be very vocal if you have dense breasts. It never crossed my mind to ask for additional testing, especially in light that breast cancer is in my family.

I was operated on September 12. I was very blessed that so many family members and good friends had fasted and prayed in my behalf. I also had a priesthood blessing the night before which took all of my jitters away. I can genuinely bare testimony of the difference it made during this entire ordeal. It was great to walk in and feel completely calm and interested in all that they did in a detached sort of way. I chose to have a lumpectomy with a sentinel node biopsy. This is where the surgeon injects either a blue dye or a radioactive tracer into the area where the tumor is located. The dye or tracer will mark the first nymph node or nodes most likely to have cancer cells if they have left the breast. This procedure is relatively new and will give the patient the advantage of being sure there’s no cancer in the nodes without the complications of a full dissection. The node is then whisked away to the lab where they look for the presence of any cancer cells. In the mean time the surgeon will do the lumpectomy while waiting for the results. If the node is clean my ordeal is done and I’m sewn up. If there are cancer cells present then the surgeon will perform the routine auxiliary node dissection. This is where the first layer of lymph nodes under the arm pit is removed and sent to the lab.

The doctor told me that I would know when I woke up if my lymph nodes were clean or not. They have to stick a drain in the wound if the latter is performed. So when I came to a couple of hours later, it was the first thing I paid attention to. All I can say was I was relieved beyond words that there was no tube sticking out of my armpit! No cancer cells in the sentinel node! I was also relieved to have no nausea from the anesthesia, that problem as wreaked havoc among other family members.