March 7, 2015

Breast Cancer - the diagnosis

You read it right. Breast cancer. I was recently diagnosed with Breast Cancer. I found the small lump on the morning of February 18. I remember just feeling my chest and right away I noticed a lump. I felt it some more and sure enough I was feeling a lump, probably about the size of a grape. So I called Dr, Carlson and scheduled an appointment to get in to see him. He couldn't get me in for a week and so the thought of having to wait for a week to see what it was was torture. Later that afternoon his nurse called me to see what I had scheduled for and I told her what I had found and she asked if I could come to the office the next morning. That was a huge relief.
So Thursday the 19th we go see Dr. Carlson. I really do have the best OB in the world. He has delivered 3 of my 5 children and I will stay with him til he no longer practices. He is just that friendly. He did an exam and felt it right away too. While he was doing his exam I had also mentioned that I had been having some kind of bloody discharge from my nipple. ( Sorry for all you boys out there who may stumble upon this.) He didn't seem too worried at all. He was under the impression that it would be simply a cyst that was it. But he recommended that I get a mammogram just to be on the safe side given the fact that there is some breast cancer on my mother's side of the family. Lance and I walked away from that appointment feeling pretty confident that it would be that and only that.
Well the mammogram was scheduled for the very next day. Looking back on all of this, it happened all so fast and doctors got my foot in every door exceptionally fast. We had planned to go to Utah that weekend for a surprise birthday party for my brother-in-law Dave who was turning 50. Lance and I tried to find a babysitter so just he and I could get away over night but we had no such luck. So Lance and I decided that he would take the three older boys and go for the weekend. Since we were pretty sure the mammogram was going to reveal a cyst and nothing more I was convinced I could go in on my own and just get it over with. Win, win!
So Lance and the boys packed up at 6 am and headed for Utah. I stayed behind with Ellie and Hayden and found a babysitter to watch the kids while I went downtown to the hospital for the mammogram. I wasn't nervous at all. Just anxious.
I waited for quite awhile and then they called me back. I was nervous actually. I was nervous about the mammogram hurting. I had heard all the stories of all the pulling and pinching. But actually it wasn't painful at all. I have no idea what those women were talking about. But maybe for women who actually have a chest it is painful. Since I am really small and flat chested it was a piece of cake.
The mammogram was fast and easy. Then after those tests I was lead into another room that had the ultrasound machine. The young gal who did my ultrasound was really nice. I felt comfortable with her. Then after she was all done she told me to wait in the room while the radiologist looked at my scans. About 10 minutes later the radiologist Dr. Anthes walked in and she was very young. Very pretty lady. She asked if she could do another ultrasound on me. I had no idea why she wanted to because I was convinced it was just a cyst but she went ahead and looked again. After a few scans she sat back and told me what she thought.
I knew right then and there it wasn't just a cyst. I could see the look on her face. She sat there and asked if I had a history of breast cancer in the family. We talked and she said that they had found two solid masses in my right breast. Cysts are usually liquid filled and the light will shine through them but solid masses pose another threat. Cancer? Fibroids? Dense tissue? She said that it the small mass measured about 1 cm and the larger one that I found was around 3.5 cm. Pretty large and very suspicious looking. She told me that I was looking at the possibility of having a 50% chance or greater of it being cancerous. My stomach literally dropped. I felt sick to my stomach and I just scared. I cried. I cried a lot. She wasn't very friendly. Kind of cold. She just sat there. I sat there by myself trying to take it all in. What was I going to tell Lance? My kids? That was my first initial thought, my kids. Sorry Lance! 
She recommended that I have a biopsy of the two masses to know and confirm what she suspected. So we set up that appointment for the next Tuesday. That was it. I walked out of the hospital feeling absolutely nauseated. I walked slowly back to my car. I couldn't even find it. I had to walk around a little in the huge parking garage to find it. Found it. Got inside and dialed Lance. He picked up the phone so cheery like always and asked "So......?" "They think it is cancer Lance." That was all I could say. All I could think about was I have cancer. I just knew it. I felt it deep inside. I knew what this was going to be. Cancer. That stupid C word that you hear about all the time. Everyone around you who has battled it, knows someone who has survived or passed on because of that C word.
I am not sure what Lance thought too. I sensed that he was nervous. We talked about the whole procedure and he asked "Do you want me to come home right now?" I really wanted him to. I was alone. But I knew that my boys were having a great time with their cousins so I told Lance to stay. I should have let him make that decision and not me. 
When I got home I let my babysitter go and I just sat down and hugged Ellie and Hayden. I cried and Ellie said "Mom, I love you most!" (We have been in this Tangled mode for a long time. Mother Gothel - me, tells Rapunzel " I love you, and Rapunzel replies , I love you more and then Mother Gothel says "I love you most!") That is our inside joke and we say it to each other all the time. I needed that. I needed someone to hug me and tell me they loved me. She did it! I cried and then we played. We played and played and made more phone calls.
Lance came home the next night after the birthday party. The boys rolled into town around 1 a.m. I was so glad to see them home. I was so glad to have him home. My boys, we were all together and that was all I wanted.
The next few days were a blur. We tried to carry on our daily lives as if nothing ever happened. Routine is a friend of mine and that helped me keep my mind on what I usually do every day when the kids get home. Do homework, hold Hayden who is sad, make dinner and try to love them all at the same time. When my boys walk through the door at 4:30 life gets pretty crazy in our home. The noise volume escalates, fights begin, hungry stomachs are churning and I am already tired. But that didn't phase me. I wanted all that back.
It is Stake Conference that weekend and I am so relieved that I don't have to face a lot of people. Just us. In and out and we are good. This time Lance is sitting with me and life is good. Man I wish it were like that each and every Sunday but he can't. He gets to sit up on the stand. Most Sunday's I envy him for that.
Tuesday morning rolls around and we show up to the same place for the biopsy. It is 7:30 am and our appointment isn't til 8 a.m. So we have a little time in our hands. We just sit patiently and wait. 8 o'clock rolls around and they call my name. Here we go!
They put me back in a room and I change into the hospital gown. The kind that makes you just feel so cute. Most likely someone just died or delivered a baby in it, but I don't care this morning. Dr. Anthes was back again. Only this time she was sweet and caring and very nice towards us. Lance was with me too so I felt like we could do it and prove them wrong that cancer wasn't it our cards.
The biopsy was fairly quick. They numbed me quite a bit and with the amount of needles they stuck in me to get tissue samples I am still amazed I didn't feel anything. 20 minutes later and we are done. That was it. 
Dr. Anthes asked if I wanted to see the tissue samples. I was curious. They looked like little white worms floating in a cup with solution in it. So they sent us on our way and told us the results would be in 2-3 days. So more waiting. I am sensing a pattern in all of this. Wait. Wait some more and then some more. So we went home. I was told I couldn't lift anything heavier than 15 lbs for the next 48 hours to prevent leaking and infection? I have not idea but I like the idea of being babysat for awhile. Lance and I decided that we would stick together 24/7 until we got the results back because we wanted to be together when the news came.
Thursday morning start early in our household. Keaton and Andrew have piano lessons before school starts. So we leave the house right around 7:30 and have our lessons and then it is off to school. I thought well today was the day they said they would call but I will be back home by 9 and surely they won't call that early. Well I was sitting on the couch waiting for Andrew to be done so we could go to school and my phone rings. It is a Boise number and so I take my phone and run out the front door. It was Dr. Anthes. My heart was beating so hard. This was it. But wait, where was Lance? Oh ya that's right, at home. So I told the doctor that we weren't together and we wanted to be when the news came in. So she was very considerate and told us that she would call back in one hour to tell us. That was one of the longest hours of my entire life.
I take the kids to school and rush home. She calls. Lance and I are sitting in his office with the speaker phone on. Dr. Anthes went into detail about the biopsy results. The smaller of the two masses came back benign. That was good. The larger one however was showing signs of DCIS in situ. Meaning and cancerous lump of cells forming in the milk duct. Now the term DCIS has two terms. One of them is invasive or in situ, meaning non-invasive. This was what she said the biopsy results were showing. This was the good kind to have. So Lance and I sat back a little relieved but at the same time I was just diagnosed with Breast Cancer. I wanted to cry but I didn't. We just sat there and talked more about other things concerning the cancer and that we needed to make an appointment with a surgeon for some options of removing it.
So we set up an appointment with Dr. Szentes. He came highly recommended by several people including my own mom, grandmother and sister who all used him at one point in their lives. We got an appointment with Dr. Szentes for that Thursday. 
We met him and he was a very nice doctor. Very polite and very sensitive to what was going on. After meeting with him and having an examination we sat down and went over my mammogram and ultrasound findings to understand what it all meant. No one up to this point had educated us at all about what they found. We were left to look it up all on our own and it was not good.
Dr. Szentes was a little concerned with the size and shape of the DCIS. He said typically you don't feel DCIS because they are small and in the milk duct. But because mine is so large and calsifications were spread throughout the area he was concerned that it has become invasive. Meaning it is starting to spread. But based on the biopsy and other tests it says DCIS non invasive. So maybe there was a mishap in the biopsy that happened. Still don't know. So we talked about treatment options and the best way to deal with what we know. He suggested I have a full mastectomy given the size of the tissue involved and how little chested I am in would leave my breast rather distorted. So that is what he recommended. He also told us that while in surgery he will do a sentinel node biopsy. This is the node that is the boss of all the other nodes. If the cancer has reached this node then they start taking each node out one by one to see if there is cancer in them. Cancer in the lymph nodes is never a good sign because this allows the cancer to move freely and faster to other areas of my body. So fingers crossed it hasn't gotten that far yet!
After the apportionment we were scheduled to have a Breast MRI.

No comments: