Cancer Diary - Part 2
Aug. 25th, 2018 03:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dyllanneI went on holiday to France and when I got back the letter was waiting for me recalling me for another mammogram. This was three weeks after my first one. I wasn’t worried. A lot of people get recalled. I figured that I would get a repeat scan, they would say it was nothing and I’d be out the door. I went for my appointment on August 7th. When I got there I was picked up from the waiting room by a nurse (Margaret) who explained to me that I had been recalled because there was something on my first scan that they wanted to look more closely at and depending on what they saw in the repeat scan they would decide what to do. She was all very serious, but I was fine. Not worried at all. They redid the scan. This time it was painful rather than uncomfortable. I waited again in the waiting room and by this time there were half a dozen of us. We were all chatting and friendly. Some people had brought family members. That wasn’t for me. I had no reason to disrupt anyone’s working day for this, because at that point I still thought everything was fine.
I got called into the room to see the doctor (Dr Mary Todd) and she took a bit of a history and told me that Dr Lawson was going to look at the thing with the scanner (ultrasound) and if she could see it she was going to biopsy it. I am still okay with this as I had been lead to expect a biopsy from the leaflets I was given. So they scan me and spot it and measure it. It’s 8mm in diameter. Under local anaesthetic they do an ultrasound guided needle biopsy and put in a titanium marker to mark the place for later. After the biopsy I had to go back for another mammogram just on the biopsied breast so they had up to date images for the consultant.
Then the same nurse got me back in for a chat. This was way more serious. She said it was likely cancer, but I would get the results of the biopsy for sure in a week at an appointment at the New Victoria. I asked if it was likely to be a cyst and she said no. It was a solid mass, but tiny. She said the planning meeting was likely to involve a pre-op assessment so I should be prepared for it to take all afternoon. Then she said that this was a very different disease to a young woman presenting with a lump. She said that because they had caught it so early it would be simple to deal with and crucially she said “ You’re going to be alright.” At this point I was a bit numb. I couldn’t quite process what I was hearing. I went back to work and picked up all my stuff and told the others I was going home. On the way home I burst into tears at least twice. I sort of stumbled into the house in a daze. This was the day that was going to change my life. It didn’t seem real. Like it was happening to someone on TV.
When I got in I messaged my friend Juliet and then decided to phone my mum right away. When I told her I burst into tears again. She said she would come down for the planning meeting for moral support and to ask questions in case I became overwhelmed. When the boys got in we had dinner and I told them after dinner. They took it in their stride as I emphasised that I was “going to be alright”.
When I got to work the next day I handed in my self-cert sickness forms for the apt the previous day and for the planning appt the next week. I told my boss what was going on. I didn’t realise at the time but he was having trouble processing the information too as he later asked me to repeat the timescale for what was happening. Or he could just have been doing man-listening.
I got called into the room to see the doctor (Dr Mary Todd) and she took a bit of a history and told me that Dr Lawson was going to look at the thing with the scanner (ultrasound) and if she could see it she was going to biopsy it. I am still okay with this as I had been lead to expect a biopsy from the leaflets I was given. So they scan me and spot it and measure it. It’s 8mm in diameter. Under local anaesthetic they do an ultrasound guided needle biopsy and put in a titanium marker to mark the place for later. After the biopsy I had to go back for another mammogram just on the biopsied breast so they had up to date images for the consultant.
Then the same nurse got me back in for a chat. This was way more serious. She said it was likely cancer, but I would get the results of the biopsy for sure in a week at an appointment at the New Victoria. I asked if it was likely to be a cyst and she said no. It was a solid mass, but tiny. She said the planning meeting was likely to involve a pre-op assessment so I should be prepared for it to take all afternoon. Then she said that this was a very different disease to a young woman presenting with a lump. She said that because they had caught it so early it would be simple to deal with and crucially she said “ You’re going to be alright.” At this point I was a bit numb. I couldn’t quite process what I was hearing. I went back to work and picked up all my stuff and told the others I was going home. On the way home I burst into tears at least twice. I sort of stumbled into the house in a daze. This was the day that was going to change my life. It didn’t seem real. Like it was happening to someone on TV.
When I got in I messaged my friend Juliet and then decided to phone my mum right away. When I told her I burst into tears again. She said she would come down for the planning meeting for moral support and to ask questions in case I became overwhelmed. When the boys got in we had dinner and I told them after dinner. They took it in their stride as I emphasised that I was “going to be alright”.
When I got to work the next day I handed in my self-cert sickness forms for the apt the previous day and for the planning appt the next week. I told my boss what was going on. I didn’t realise at the time but he was having trouble processing the information too as he later asked me to repeat the timescale for what was happening. Or he could just have been doing man-listening.