Oh Hai There, Mastectomy! We Meet Again!
This Friday I’m getting my remaining booby removed as a preemptive strike against more breast cancer. I first got b.c. back in 2006, and had a radical mastectomy then, plus chemo. (My reports on that are here.) Ever since then, my doctor has tested my blood every couple of months…and thank goodness, because last July the test raised a little red warning flag and yelled “DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!” So the doctor ran some scans on me which included chug-a-lugging about 48 ounces of a barium/zesty citrus punch/mule piss solution (I made up the part about the mule piss), and he found a tiny clump of breast cancer cells in my lower backbone. The cells had migrated there from the original cancer site and then somehow managed to survive the chemo blasts and stay hidden and dormant until July, when they voted to start growing. Luckily they were still tiny and hadn’t been growing for very long, so the doctors drew a basketball court on my back with Magic Markers and gave me fourteen radiation treatments, and the cancery backbone bit is now a fried, dead little wad of scar tissue. (I asked them if they could just remove that vertebrae and replace it with a jar lid, but they said no.)
During the bone scan, a technician was perched beside me at a little console screen like Sulu at the helm of the starship Enterprise, and at one point he too-casually said “I’m just going to take a closer look at your lower leg,” and I thought “Oh, shit, I’ve got shin cancer,” and then Sulu asked me if I’d ever broken my big toe, because his console was showing a shadow on it, and I said “I’ve got cancer of the toe?” But he finally decided that it was just arthritis.
After the radiation treatments were finished, they scanned me again and found a suspicious-looking spot on one of my ovaries. It turned out to be harmless, but as a precaution (and much to the dismay of my insurance company) they let me have a complete hysterectomy, so I no longer have to worry about malignant things growing in my girly bits. I had that surgery in January, and it all healed up just fine…and just in time for a tumor to appear last week in my remaining breast. *headdesk*
Thankfully, within two days of its debut we had it biopsied, and it’s benign, but I don’t want to risk that poor ol’ teat ever growing another tumor -- the next one might be malignant, and might leak cancer cells into other parts of me the way the first one did. So this Friday it’s all coming off, and afterward I’m going to buy a T-shirt that’s printed across the padded chest: “THESE ARE FAKE. MY REAL ONES TRIED TO KILL ME.”
This Friday I’m getting my remaining booby removed as a preemptive strike against more breast cancer. I first got b.c. back in 2006, and had a radical mastectomy then, plus chemo. (My reports on that are here.) Ever since then, my doctor has tested my blood every couple of months…and thank goodness, because last July the test raised a little red warning flag and yelled “DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!” So the doctor ran some scans on me which included chug-a-lugging about 48 ounces of a barium/zesty citrus punch/mule piss solution (I made up the part about the mule piss), and he found a tiny clump of breast cancer cells in my lower backbone. The cells had migrated there from the original cancer site and then somehow managed to survive the chemo blasts and stay hidden and dormant until July, when they voted to start growing. Luckily they were still tiny and hadn’t been growing for very long, so the doctors drew a basketball court on my back with Magic Markers and gave me fourteen radiation treatments, and the cancery backbone bit is now a fried, dead little wad of scar tissue. (I asked them if they could just remove that vertebrae and replace it with a jar lid, but they said no.)
During the bone scan, a technician was perched beside me at a little console screen like Sulu at the helm of the starship Enterprise, and at one point he too-casually said “I’m just going to take a closer look at your lower leg,” and I thought “Oh, shit, I’ve got shin cancer,” and then Sulu asked me if I’d ever broken my big toe, because his console was showing a shadow on it, and I said “I’ve got cancer of the toe?” But he finally decided that it was just arthritis.
After the radiation treatments were finished, they scanned me again and found a suspicious-looking spot on one of my ovaries. It turned out to be harmless, but as a precaution (and much to the dismay of my insurance company) they let me have a complete hysterectomy, so I no longer have to worry about malignant things growing in my girly bits. I had that surgery in January, and it all healed up just fine…and just in time for a tumor to appear last week in my remaining breast. *headdesk*
Thankfully, within two days of its debut we had it biopsied, and it’s benign, but I don’t want to risk that poor ol’ teat ever growing another tumor -- the next one might be malignant, and might leak cancer cells into other parts of me the way the first one did. So this Friday it’s all coming off, and afterward I’m going to buy a T-shirt that’s printed across the padded chest: “THESE ARE FAKE. MY REAL ONES TRIED TO KILL ME.”