Surgery Looms

I met with the surgeon on Friday and had various pre-op tests (blood, X-ray, EKG) performed. Memorial Sloan-Kettering is a well-oiled machine; you are tunnelled from office to office, where a kindly nurse or technician takes you through exactly what you must do and what will happpen. As unpleasant as it is (the depersonalization, no matter how well-meant, the technologies, leave-your-clothes-here, recite your name and birth date), there's also a kind of comfort in it: they've done this thousands of times and they know exactly what they're doing.

Dr. C., my surgeon, exudes professional competence and calm. He will change the breast shape as little as possible, since the MRI result was so good...with the small exception of that nipple, of course. The surgery is outpatient, and aside from a bit more rest than usual, I should have a quick recovery and can go back to work in a week, JUST in time for the first day of classes, coincidentally. All this was reassuring.

But then he said: There's a 90% chance that we will find nothing more, as the MRI indicated. But we won't really know until the post-op pathology report comes back, 7-10 days later. Even an MRI isn't a hundred percent reliable. If the path report shows more cancer than we thought, we'll have to go back in and do a mastectomy.

Oh. So that provokes more anxiety. I'm almost there, but could be stopped in my tracks, as when it turned out that the sentinel lymph node was malignant eleven years ago. The odds were against that too. The result of that was five months of chemotherapy and a much bigger, more painful operation.

But keep the spirits and optimisim up. Worry isn't going to make it better or worse.