A Card is Worth a Thousand Thoughts

This is a little reminder that my surgery is this coming Wednesday, October 2 at 8:30 a.m. Specific prayer for those who like details: Dr. Rager is the surgeon, Dr. Hughes is the plastic surgeon, and the hospital is St. Francis in Greenwood, IN. Pray that the fire alarm doesn't go off during my surgery (ha, ha). It is expected to be about a 5 hour surgery.

Many have asked  how I am feeling, and I must say that I am doing well. I am sleeping fine and trying to get a lot of exercise as that will be limited for a few weeks. I am not looking forward to sitting still for a couple of weeks, but I will plan to get a lot of reading and TV watching in! The last time I was on "bed rest" was right before Stacey was born. I had toxemia and had to spend the last 5 weeks of pregnancy on the couch. That is all all a blur to me now, as I hope that this experience will some day be too.

I wish I could send a thank you card to everyone who sent me a get well card, but I know that is silly. People don't send cards to get cards!  I have appreciated all of the cards, texts, e-mails, prayers, and people I see asking me how I am doing. It doesn't bother me at all- it let's me know people care. 

I will try to post something soon after surgery day to let everyone know how it went. I will be in the hospital overnight, so will probably be able to post on Thursday when I get home since the anesthesia will still be in my system! :) They are going to put a little anesthesia block in my back to slowly pump into me and gradually wear off so I should be able to manage! (Or I might just show Brian how to post something on Facebook!)

For those wondering, I think my October meals are taken care of. My neighbor set up an online meal sign up for 3 days per week in October, so if we have to add anymore due to needing chemo treatments, I will post the website here on my blog for anyone who wants to sign up.

Thank you everyone for taking the time to read this and for showing me your love and friendship in so many ways! While I am just sitting around I will post some books I have been reading and some things God is teaching me through this.

Surgery Date and Other Tidbits

After meeting with oncologists I decided to go ahead and have a single masectomy, and it is scheduled for October 2 at 8:00 a.m. It is about a 5 hour surgery because they are going to do reconstruction at the same time, which means they put something called a tissue expander in there, and I will have to go for monthly appointments and eventually have the tissue expander replaced with an implant (probably next spring or summer).
I know some of you are wondering, how did you get all the way to surgery #3 before making this decision? It is not an easy road, digesting information, talking to others with similar experiences, and ultimately deciding between a couple of options. My surgeon was very nice indicating that many people have breast conserving surgery and radiation and take tamoxifen and that is the extent of their treatment. One thing I learned in meeting with oncologists (separate from my surgeon) is that the size of the tumor and stage of cancer often drives the treatment recommendations.  I also learned that this can vary depending on what doctor or oncologist you get your opinion from.  Right from the start I knew if I had a good surgeon, I would get good recommendations for follow up treatments. I have a great surgeon and she works with different oncologists who have different treatment recommendations. Some people who might share the same surgeon might choose different oncologists depending on their insurance or friend recommendations.

Radiologists and oncologists have guidelines they follow, but some of them also treat each person as an individual and not as a category. The one thing I liked about the medical oncologist I talked to is that he said to me, "I will not make a recommendation about chemotherapy until I see the pathology report, and  talk to some colleagues who have been doing this longer than me. I will share your case with them and we will talk about the best treatment."  I want to know that utmost thought and research was put into my case, so I can truly say, "I trust your recommendation." Christian or not, God has given many people wonderful brains and abilities for "such a time as this." I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to live in a time period where we have advanced medical care. My prayer is that God will give wisdom to the surgeons and oncologists so that whatever treatment is recommended, I know it is from Him, traveling through them, and I will have peace that if I have to have chemo, that it has first been through God's hands.

Enough thought processing for today. Thank you for reading. If you would like to pray specifically, here are the names of my "team": Dr. Erika Rager, Surgeon; Dr. Hughes, plastic surgeon; Dr. Bolla, medical oncologist.  I will leave you with a link to my stage II diagnosis and what options there are for treatment if you are interested in learning more. Treatment for Stage II Breast Cancer (fyi, my tumor was 3.1 cm- considered large- and I have no cancer in my lymph nodes).

What is Going On?

I never really thought I would start a blog to keep people updated on any health issues going on with me, but I have had so many loving, caring people ask me how I am doing and what happened and how can they help, that I have decided to go ahead and write a blog. This will prevent me putting a lot of stuff on FB that some people just may not be interested in or ready to see when they open up FB!  A blog allows people to "check in" when it is convenient for them.

So much has happened since June 12th that I am trying to figure out how to be succinct. I guess I will just start from the beginning. I started my yearly mammograms when I was 41, in March of 2012. In October 2012 I had a biopsy on some calcifications on my right breast. All was clear. In March of 2013 I felt a lump near the surface of my right breast. After it did not go away, I made an appointment to have it checked on June 12, 2013.  The doctor ordered an ultrasound biopsy, and the result came back positive for breast cancer.

At that point I did not know what stage it was at. All I knew is it needed to be removed via a surgery. I quickly gathered my thoughts and contacted someone I knew who had a masectomy in January. She recommended a surgeon at St. Francis Hospital in Greenwood, Dr. Erika Rager, and I made an appointment for a consultation right away.  She was wonderful and we scheduled a surgery for July 22, 2013- a lumpectomy. When the pathology report came back, it did not show clear margins. She had removed a Stage 2 lump identified as papillary carcinoma, the rarest type of breast cancer that accounts for 1% of all breast cancers.  Surrounding the lump was DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ) stage 0, which is pre-cancerous cells that could turn into cancer, but most oncologists agree that this is a type of cancer in the breast that must be monitored or removed. Since it was surrounding my stage 2 cancer, it needed to come out.

A second surgery was scheduled for August 26. Again, the pathology report came back and the margins were not clear. As my surgeon said, there is a lot in there! It is stuff you can't see with the naked eye. Only a pathology investigation can reveal this. My surgeon set me up with appointments to consult with a radiologist oncologist and a medical oncologist, both of whom I met with this past Friday, September 6. We discussed my choices: radiation therapy with chemo therapy, or masectomy with possible chemotherapy. When I weighed my chances of reoccurance, I decided that it might be best to plan a single masectomy. I am currently trying to schedule a surgery for the week of October 9- right before Fall Break, so I will have 2 weeks to recover at home. Once the mass goes to pathology, a decision will be made about chemotherapy.

Future updates will probably not be so lengthy, but I wanted to be sure that everyone sort of knew how I got to where I am right now.