How it started

HEY EVERYONE! This is hard for me but I'm trying to make myself stop answering individual emails..... They have been so wonderful -- really you guys have gotten me through the initial anxiety. I hate to leave so much love unacknowledged -- but I find I am staying up past midnight every night answering them.....

Course I often stayed up past midnight before, but that is going to have to change now -- because I'm going to need my strength. I already eat well and exercise well -- but I suck at getting enough sleep during the week -- and I'm passing that on to my son I'm afraid. I never saw any research claiming that cancer was caused by lack of sleep, but I think rest will help me heal better..... soon as I figure out which path to take.

I need to start treatment in the next two weeks, the surgeon said. I saw the MRI and I agree -- in fact I want that bad boy* off me like YESTERDAY! Which is what made me think of the title for this blog.... :-) (*"that bad boy" = my right breast and some lymph nodes -- this is stage 2 breast cancer -- I hope. They haven't scanned the REST of my body yet.)

Oh you know what I want to share? Haven't you always heard that cancer doesn't hurt? The painful lumps are safe.... right? Well mine hurts. I mean it doens't hurt enough to complain about -- just enough not to worry about it. So I didn't. It's not a distinct tumor, but a messy blob of cancer all mixed in with a fibrocyst -- probably it's the fibrocyst that hurts, though since the MRI I realized that it hurts all the way up into the lymph -- that's not the fibrocyst..... I don't think. I did have a negative mammogram 2 years ago, and again last week -- negative again, the day before I had the abnormal lymph node removed from my armpit. I thought it was just a lymph node turned to stone -- caused by an infection or something.

This is why I was diagnosed at stage 2 -- before it got to the lymph there was nothing to find. It was seen on an MRI but what insurance company is going to pay for an MRI of the breasts of a woman with only negative mammograms, no family history of breast cancer, and who nursed for 8 years? Even after I found the lump and the surgeon suspected breast cancer he said he'd like an MRI but that my insurance company would never pay for it -- so I'd need to have the lump out and then we could have an MRI if it was positive. I knew he suspected breast cancer but i thought he probably just saw so much breast cancer that he saw it in his sleep at night.... and it was not about me. Told people I was having a node turned to stone removed from my armpit....

Anyway -- fast forward a few days.... at THIS point I need to be figuring out:
1) chemo first or mastectomy first? and
2) where?

Have an oncologist appt thursday, local -- and trying to get an appt at Johns Hopkins for Friday-Monday-Tuesday. That will take all day I imagine..... haven't done so much parenting lately..... and have been turning away work. I'm steady on the biking and swimming, though -- I need to keep that up now especially or I won't be able to sleep or think straight to make decisions.

So I'm supposed to figure out where to go and get it all in place to start treatment within a couple of weeks -- keeping in mind that I might should go to fancy faraway hospital because I have an unusual cancer and want to have the best shot I can at getting old enough to try not to die of a heart attack at 77 like my Nana and Papa. Hmmm, maybe it's not just my fault about not getting enough sleep.....