cancer – day 17

There are still a lot of people I should have let know about the surgery and what’s going on with me, so I did an e-mail blast tonight. This entry basically contains the same thoughts and comments as that e-mail.

I am sorry to send you this news in an e-mail blast, but I wanted to let you know that I was diagnosed with an invasive malignant breast cancer (infiltrating ductal carcinoma) on April 25. Since then I’ve had a multitude of additional tests, procedures, and more biopsies which thankfully have so far shown the cancer to be contained enough for a single lumpectomy. We will also do a sentinel node biopsy then, which will tell us whether the cancer has spread to other parts of the body so they can stage the cancer. So far what they’ve seen of the lymph nodes in my MRIs and such look clean, but they’re doing another biopsy to be sure.

My surgery is tomorrow afternoon, Tuesday, May 14 at the Marshall Medical Center in Placerville (about 45 minutes from Volcanoville where I live). I actually have a bunch of medical stuff before the surgery tomorrow too. . .an echocardiogram at 8:15, getting a stint (guiding wire) put in at 10, a radiation treatment and the sentinel lymph node biopsy at noon, and then the actual lumpectomy and reconstructive surgery at 2. All this, and it’s all outpatient. I should be sleeping in my own bed next to Mizzou and Seoul (my two cats) again tomorrow night, how wild is that? My parents arrived last night and will be staying at my house and taking care of me during the surgery recovery.

Because it’s rare for someone my age to get breast cancer, and because it is both more aggressive and more likely to recur in younger women (under 40), my surgeons and doctors are all telling me that I will undergo aggressive chemotherapy treatments regardless of the results of the sentinel node biopsy. Chemo will start about a month after surgery, and the current plan is that I will go stay at Mom and Dad’s place in South Dakota during the chemotherapy, which will be three to six months in duration. About a month after that I’ll start radiation treatments in Sacramento: fifteen minutes a day five days a week for 6-1/2 weeks. I guess all that means I may get back to a normal life sometime between December and February, give or take a month.

It’s a serious diagnosis, to be sure, but we’re doing everything that can be done, and the technological advances in the past ten years or so have been truly amazing, so much so that I have every confidence that this is essentially another medical process I have to go through, and I will be fine when it’s over. Heck, I’ll generally be fine while I’m going through it too, especially with the friends who have been my support so far and of course my family who is taking such an active role in my treatment and recovery and all of their friends who are wishing me a complete and speedy recovery as well.

I have started an online journal, so if you want to keep track of my progress and get a dose of my personal opinions on the process, what I’m experiencing, and what’s going on in my life during this time, feel free to check out my blog now and again: http://cielemel.blogspot.com/.

Best regards,
Cynthia