Here's What's Going on with Me

Well friends, here is news. About a month ago I was sitting around, as is my wont, and I felt a little lump in my right breast, right next to my nipple. If I had still been nursing Hank, I would have thought it was one of those little milk reservoirs. I noted it and then went about my life for a week. I mean, you know how boobs are, they seem to change from time to time throughout the month. The next week I noticed it again, and decided to go have it checked. Then three days later I actually did. I thought the nurse practitioner would say, "Oh, that's a so-and-so, no need to worry." What she actually did was to tell me to go have a mammogram, but not to freak out. She said that I needed a baseline anyway, because I am 37. Or as I like to think of myself, "barely 37."

That was on a Friday. The next Monday I went to the mammography place. Waiting for this to begin, I was still not really worried. The odds were that it would be nothing. And after the nurse gave me a kimono that she'd taken out of one of those blanket warmers, and I was reading magazines with the other kimono'd ladies, I felt a little like I was at a spa. Maybe waiting for a facial. But then the mammogram started and it was like the worst spa treatment ever. Then they asked me to wait with the magazines again. It was a different bunch of ladies and I no longer felt like I was enjoying a day of pampering. The tech came and got me and said that they wanted eight more pictures, and an ultrasound. If possible the second round of pictures was more uncomfortable than the first, as it included a fun thing called "spot compression." Then I was whisked to the ultrasound room. Or not whisked. Made to wait in my kimono some more.

Then the ultrasound tech did her thing with the ultrasound wand and the warm jelly. That took a little while, and I could see the monitor but nothing on it meant anything to me. Not like looking for the baby's little feet. Then she said, "Okay, I'm going to go get the radiologist and she's probably going to want to scan for herself." She left, and I lay there in the dark for fifteen minutes. I had the kimono and a towel and the cold jelly. I thought about my innocent clothes waiting in a locker. I thought it probably wasn't good that the radiologist wanted to come look for herself. I thought about Laura and Hank. This was a low point.

Finally the doctor came in and took a brief look and said, "We want you to go have a needle biopsy of this." Then she talked about ultrasound-guided biopsy and implanting a titanium chip with the biopsy needle, and then a mammogram to check the localization of the chip in comparison to the mass (we were calling it that now, a mass), and then a possible stereotactic biopsy if the chip didn't match up to the location of the mass. Confused? It took me a couple of run throughs to get it. I was still lying there with the towel and the jelly, and I felt like I'd lost about fifty IQ points. The doctor said something about calcifications, and I said, "You mean calcium like in bones?" I think she thought I was a little slow.

This was when my reality changed from "there is nothing wrong with me" to "there is maybe something wrong with me." It was one of the grimmest moments of this whole thing thus far. Somehow I got dressed and then the ultrasound tech was calling to schedule my biopsy for me. I told her that I couldn't do it Friday, because I had Laura's slumber party that night. Then I almost started to cry, but I pinched the web of skin between my thumb and index finger really hard with my other hand. I used my fingernails, and that helped. I did not want to walk out of there in tears.

A few days later, a week ago Thursday, I went to have the needle biopsy. Matt went with me. Everyone was great, the nurses were really caring and good. I admired them. Instead of leaving me alone in the dark, a nurse named Shelly came in and told me that the radiologist was delayed a little bit, then she talked to me about the Olympics. We covered them in minute detail. We were on to the possible underscoring of Johnny Weir's routine when the doc came in and got underway. Shelly held my hand.

(Remember that joke where the doctor says to the woman, "First I need to numb your breasts." "All right doctor, go ahead." So he goes, "Num num num num num!" It's an oldie but a goodie.)

I was still, even then, basically convinced that it would be nothing. I had just heard of so many people with lumps that turned out to be benign. They're boobs, they have stuff going on. The biopsy crew said that maybe the pathology results would be back Friday afternoon, the day of Laura's party, and I wouldn't have to wait the weekend. No such luck, Friday came and went. Then Monday came and went, with only apologies from Shelly and the other nurses. By now I thought, "Hmm. If it's a bad diagnosis, they will need multiple pairs of eyes to confirm it and it will take longer."

Is this the longest post ever?

So then it was Tuesday morning and I was dressed to go to tennis practice. I was opening the door for Fabienne the house cleaner when the phone rang, and it was the radiologist who'd done the biopsy. That's not good when the radiologist calls instead of the nurse. She pretty quickly got the word "unfortunately" out, and then I knew that I'd been wrong, and that I'd missed my last chance for it to be just nothing. I was listening to her talk, and I walked into Matt's office and made a thumbs-down sign. We crowded around the phone as she told me I needed to go get a surgical consult, then she asked me if I wanted to know what the pathology report said, and I was like, "Uh, YES." She told me to get a pencil, and I wrote down "ductal carcinoma in situ" and "infiltrating ductal carcinoma," low to intermediate grade.

I hung up and we were pretty shaky. It was ten o'clock on the nose, and I thought, "Tennis is starting without me." I called Normal Neighbor, who is the tennis captain, and told her I wasn't coming to practice and why. She had been waiting for word of the biopsy results. Then I told Fabienne, because she was standing right there at ground zero. So now the tennis team knew, and my house cleaner. To put it mildly, I knew this would save me the trouble of telling a great many people. Fabienne, who is very sweet, and very spiritual, started talking to me about the End Times, and how everything happens for a Reason, and how I would be a Testimony to the people around me. I wanted to tell her, "Fabienne, I am not really there just yet, I mean to the being a testimony part, but one thing you can do to help me right now is clean my house." What I actually did was thank her and nod some.

Forty-five minutes later, Hank was at Pretty Neighbor's and Matt and I were at our regular doctor's office, an internist. She was reading the report as she came into the room. We were keeping it together. I had never actually met this doc before because I always see the nurse practitioner. I love nurse practitioners and think that they secretly run most things. That nurse had done my last gyno and breast exam back in September. So the doctor was new to me. She was very, very comforting. She said that this mass is small, that it's early, and that I'm going to be fine. She said that if I could pick a breast cancer, this would be the one. She said that it will be a bump in the road. We listened with greedy ears to this reassurance. She said that she would be shocked if it had spread to a lymph node. While I was glad to hear that, I also know that we won't know that until they are in there. I feel like I have arrived at this point against the long odds that it would be benign, so who knows? Maybe I will just continue to blast through the barriers erected by probability. But I hope not and I hope she is right.

I know that worse things are happening to people every minute. I know this won't kill me.

She told me that I would have a surgical consult with these breast specialists--they're said to be the best in the biz--and that I would probably have a lumpectomy. The tricky part was that this was last Tuesday, and I couldn't get any earlier appointment with the surgeons than a week hence, tomorrow. It was a long, long week. Every day felt like a month. I had this sense that urgent action was needed, but there was really nothing to do. Or, there were plenty of things to do. Lots of acting normal was required. Which wasn't so hard. Matt and I are feeling worried, but not really down. Just, like, "Let's figure out what the next thing is and do it."

In the morning, early--like the crack of doom early--Matt and I are heading down to Northside Hospital to meet the surgeon and figure out a plan. And I will tell you all what it is. Matt's mom is here to look after the kids tomorrow, and she arrived surfing on an avalanche of food her friends had sent. Lasagna at our place, y'all.

Could this post please be longer please? I didn't have time to make it shorter. So that is the news from here. I know that some of you have dealt with this very thing before. I kind of hate delivering this news via blog, because if you read here regularly, then I feel that we are friends. And it's kind of a crap way to tell bad news to friends, but I wanted y'all to know. This morning I had breakfast with Michele, and then we got our nails done. That was very therapeutic. And I kind of bought a lot of things from that Liberty of London line at Target. I'm sure you will be hearing about that too.