Lumpectomy
[Editor's Note: This is gross. Feel free to skip. However, one in eight women will develop breast cancer in their lifetime. I personally know four, including me, under age 50. Get your mammos, ladies.]
After the biopsy, they left a metal clip behind to sort of guide my surgeon in. Most people have an actual tumor. I don't have that. I have these invisible calcifications that only show up on a mammogram. They took some of them out in my biopsy, but what is left is scattered.
Usually, women have one wire inserted in their breast prior to surgery, X marks the spot.
They put the little calf pumper sleeves on me (if you haven't had surgery, they inflate one side at a time during surgery to prevent blood clots in the legs). Good stuff, but the tubes drag. Then they hooked me up to an IV. Also good stuff.
We went back to radiology to get my wire inserted. I was in a chair, which they pumped up like at the salon. I offered to stand, but they said it would be awhile and also, some people pass out.
They put me in a mammogram machine with a hole in the plate and shot in the burny numbing stuff, just like the biopsy. The breast care woman whose job is to be a human was there at my side as the nurse and radiologist fed in wire #1. It was very similar to how you would feed a wire through a wall, with all the jamming normally involved. A few times during the entire procedure they hit spots not numb, and I would yelp and more numbing burny stuff would be applied.
More pictures. A second wire. More jamming and the pressure that indicates that right now, you might be a gristly and somewhat difficult piece of meat.
By now, this is all happening a foot below my head, but I don't want to see wires jammed in my body, numb or not, so I close my eyes and cry, and the breast lady removes my glasses and wipes away my tears and asks me if it hurts and I say, no, but this is so weird. And I am, you know, a human. Humans have feelings.
Then we think it is done and they tape a Dixie cup over the wires that protrude three inches out and they take another picture and it's as though there are far right Republican calcifications who have fled Nippleopolis to settle on my chest wall far from the riffraff. Even in my body I have to deal with boundary wars. The radiologist declares he needs another wire to triangulate what needs to come out. So now we need to shove my boob and its two wires back into the mammography machine and through the hole for the third wire.
The surgeon comes to see what is taking so long and I curse the Republican calcifications.
Finally, me, my IV pole, my calf tubes, my Dixie cup and the beginnings of a barbed wire fence are rolled back to surgery.
As we roll into the OR, one of the students is on her phone and I have a brief and completely irrational fear of ending up on Snapchat.
I spent yesterday in a hydrocortizone haze and today am down to Advil. The pain is not bad considering the bastards on my chest wall and what looks to be a two-inch incision.
I won't go into further detail, but I don't look the same. I had a good cry. My chest has never been a point of pride, but it was, you know, symmetrical.
For now, I focus on healing. I get my initial radiation scan before vacation and start radiation in late June. I couldn't get in for genetic testing and counseling until August, which sucks, because BRCA could change everything. I haven't fought for something different because I need to not control this one. I need to show up and let the professionals handle it. They didn't take lymph nodes or do a MRI because my surgeon says it's aggressive overkill with DCIS and I chose to believe him. I'm not a doctor and I need to not feel any level of responsibility in this. If I die because I trusted a board-certified medical professional, I won't blame myself. Or him, really. I don't think we should blame doctors short of gross negligence. Our bodies are loose cannons, and we're all terminal. It's just a case of what you'll die of, and when, not if. Never if.
I go back to work on Monday so I'm not doing shit this weekend. I slept most of today. Texted with a friend who has a friend who just had a double mastectomy. That is worse. Yet I'm sulking today, because no one wins in the Suffering Olympics and I really didn't see this one coming. At all. They might be small, but they used to match. Fuck it.
Onward.