It's Your Time To Sparkle

This week has been a roller coaster of emotions. People who know me, know I was not in the correct line when the attribute of patience was disbursed. My medical providers offer access to our medical records through a secure app. Rather than wait to hear from my medical team, I immediately read any new reports, including pathology reports. I read about the invasive carcinoma days before I was schedule to hear the results from the medical staff. Well….when the tissue tracker came back from my lumpectomy, I jumped right on an read it.

Somehow, I always manage to read the entire thing and focus on the bad results, rather than the positive portion. The tissue margins were all clear, so that is wonderful news. They removed thirteen lymph nodes and as I read the results of each node, I am thinking this is great. Then I get to the bottom of the list and the last two nodes are marked as showing Macro metastases in one and Micro metastases in another. I do not know about you, but when I read about something I am not familiar with, I immediately start researching it. I read that metastases means the cancer cells have broken off the tumor and are starting to travel to other parts of the body. At least that I what I took it to mean. Since I am sitting on the sofa in my living room and my husband is outside, I decide that I need to take a few minutes and gather my emotions, because they were going everywhere.

My thoughts ran from not seeing my great grandchildren grow up to how will my family do if I die. In the matter of minutes, I was thinking about the burden I might be to my family. After about 15 minutes or a huge pity party, I pulled my big girl panties up, ( and mine really are BIG girl panties!) and decided to look at some of the positives. I will admit, through out the day, those negative thoughts would creep in, but I would shove them back.

We went to my post op appointment and met with the nurse practitioner. She was very clear that she was only there to check the drain and make sure there were no issues and to decide if it could be removed or not. It could not and she scheduled me for a return appointment for next Monday. I told her I read the tissue tracker report and she said she wondered if I had seen it. Again, she clarified she was only there to check my drain, but did ask if I had an oncologist yet. Well….that just brought all the negatives right back to the forefront. My husband kept reminding me, we fought back 23 years ago, and we would make it through this as well.

My surgeon is on vacation this week, but he called me Wednesday to discuss the results and what it meant. I wonder just how many doctors call their patients from vacation at the beach. He advised me not to worry and that his office was sending my cancer cells to a lab in California for review. They will determine if chemo is needed or not. He also, said my “?” were on the smaller of the scale for needing chemo, so their is a chance I will just have radiation. That seems like good news, right?

I received a call for my Radiation Oncologist’s office and they can not locate my records from my previous treatments in Atlanta. The person who called made it sound like they could not give me radiation, if they could not find out how much radiation was given in 2001? I called Atlanta and they purged all of their records from before 2005. Great! I then called my doctors office from when we lived in NC to see if they still had them. The person I spoke to said she did not see them but would be happy to send whatever she could find as soon as she received the release from from the Oncologist’s office. That was Monday, today is Thursday and I have not heard from the Oncologist’s office, so who knows what will happen from here. Chemo or no Chemo, Radiation, or no Radiation…….

After all of that, I took some time away to craft and felt so much calmer afterward. My husband and I have a plaster cast of our hands in each others. The stencil God Gave Me You was a perfect choice to accompany it. If you would like to see the YouTube video of my craft, click here. Please keep in mind, I was not up to full speed on this video.