All Kinds of Not So Fine

I'm not going to pussyfoot around. Chances are if you're here, you already know I have breast cancer. If you didn't know about this blog before, it's no indication of our intimacy - I'm just so shy that the only people that do visit me here found this all by themselves. So I got a little more comfortable with the whole blog-being-read-by-humans idea about a second ago and now I'm going to tell the whole world about what's going on with my breasts. How bizarre.

Over the past couple of weeks (I was diagnosed on February 8th) Mark and I have become slowly aware of how many people love and care for us, and we are daily wowed by one or seven of you at a time. But unfortunately we just can't talk to all of you as often as we'd like. And since things are happening pretty fast at this point, we figured it was time to blog. Feel free to visit, comment, and share with abandon.

One quick thought before I launch in to the latest in my medical adventure. This blog's theme is not changing. It's still about our slow little home, and I'm looking forward to boring you with tales of my orchids, recipes, and wildly executed projects. Cancer is not going to become my story, I've decided. But right now, it's what's happening.

So I have been diagnosed with DCIS, or Ductal Carcinoma In Situ. This means it has started and is now in a duct of my right breast. So far on the testing front I've had a mammogram (which is where this story all began), an MRI, a stereotactic biopsy, and a PET/CT. All of which shows that there are a few lymph nodes that are "questionable" for invasion, but no other malignancies to be found elsewhere in my body. Those questionable readings may be the result of the inflammation caused by my various and fast-paced procedures, or a spreading of cancer to that area. Unfortunately the size of the tumor in my breast makes it a bad candidate for a lump-ectomy. What's warranted is a simple (meaning no muscle involved) mastectomy with sentinel node biopsy and reconstruction. So all of my breast tissue will be removed. Before the tumor comes out, a special dye is injected into that duct, and that dye will then migrate and show the exact lymph that duct drains to, the sentinel node. That will be visually examined and a quick pathology read will be done. If those show no cancer, no other lymph nodes will be removed. If it does show cancer, the rest of the nodes in that group will come out, too. Either way fuller pathology tests will be done on everything, the results of which we'll get a few days out of surgery. So Monday, February 25th at 2 p.m. is my scheduled kickoff. This is a lot to handle and I'm a little nervy. Any positive thoughts and prayers you can send my way will be fully appreciated.

Today we ran around for various pre-op appointments, so we're a bit bushed. But we're off to meet my parents for dinner at Las Olas, so looking forward to the absolute perfect cheese enchilada. It's always the little things.