cancer – day 426
I had an appointment with the surgeon today. Let me start off by saying that the most exciting moment of my day was when I had to stop the car on the way there to wait for a chicken to cross the road. I kid you not!
So, nothing exciting from the surgeon. I told him I’m still sore and don’t quite have full range of motion, that I have totally crappy strength with my right arm, and that it still really hurts in the underarm area where the lymph nodes were taken out, especially if I try to lift anything or hold anything heavier than a pound or two. He gave me the expected “that’s to be expected.” It’s been a year since my surgery, but he said he’s not at all surprised by what I’m telling him about how it feels, because radiation basically does that, when you have radiation over a tumor removal surgery site, it makes the muscles much more sore and it can take a really long time to get back to “normal.” I hadn’t heard that about radiation making the surgery recovery longer, but it’s a convenient explanation. It’s not like anyone gave me an option of NOT doing radiation, so what does it matter if radiation makes the surgery recovery take a long time or not? It is what it is.
But at least there’s nothing unusual about it, it didn’t set off any alarms with the surgeon to worry that there’s new tumor growth or anything like that. And he did an exam and the tissue is fine, still radiation-burn damaged, but no little lumps or bumps to get nervous about.
Which eased my guilt over not scheduling a mammogram yet. I’ve been gone a lot and the darn medical oncologist didn’t even tell me where to call when I asked, he just said I should get a mammogram done. Maybe I’ll get one set up for when I get back from my family vacation in August, but, you know, by then it will pretty much be time for the MRI scan thing, which I have a lot more confidence in than a mammogram anyway. Granted, I’d never had a mammogram before my doctor found the lump last year because I wasn’t old enough to start them yet, but even when they did the mammogram (which totally sucked) and they KNEW where to look for the tumor, they still couldn’t figure out a darn thing from the mammogram. And then the mammogram the day of the surgery, omg it was horrible after all those biopsies. And in that mammogram they wouldn’t have known where to go except that the biopsy surgeon had put a metal pellet in at the biopsy site. At least they could see THAT on the mammogram. The MRI isn’t as painful as a mammogram, just that uck of having an IV in for a while and then getting that cold black dye pumped in so they can see where and how the blood flows in the MRI. Go figure, that I would prefer getting a damn needle stuck in me and kept there for twenty minutes rather than suffer through a four minute mammogram. I detest needles, I get faint. But, it is what it is!