The Hospital Visit

I was a bundle of nerves going in today as I knew I would get info that determined how my life will go. My pulse was almost 80 (usually 55). Lots of time spent just waiting and waiting. In all, I was there 5 hours. So the good news was that by palpation and ultrasound, all my nodes look and feel normal-there is a 20% chance that some still could contain cancer. Still right before my surgery, they will inject radioactive dye into the lymph system closest to my tumor and the dye will migrate to the node most likely to have cancer in it. They check this node out cell by cell and if it is clean they won't take all my nodes out and I might maintain the use of my right arm. Dr. D thinks she can schedule my surgery next Tuesday but it has to be cleared by radiology and nuclear medicine first. The other good news is that the tumor is well away from my chest wall and readily resectable. It doesn't have the long tentacles I was afraid it would have so they should get good margins.

The bad news that makes me so disappointed and frightened is that all my nuclear receptor tests were negative. If I was estrogen positive, the cancer could be readily stopped by cutting off its estrogen supply. Having ER positive tumors increases ones survival way over the negative kind. I am not sure the ramifications of being progesterone negative. In the past, being Her2 positive was a death sentence but now Herceptin kills these tumors effectively so I won't have that option either.

So they are going to recommend chemo even though my tumor is small due to its aggressiveness and that sounds like torture.

Taking Prem-pro stimulates estrogen positive tumors to grow and they are usually very easy to deal with. However since my tumor is negative, who knows what caused it. Not prem-pro.

I didn't get to see the social worker as I spent so much time in ultrasound. All of us victims (about 8-hard to tell as some of them had support people with them-I did it alone) saw a video on breast cancer and options, most having to do with mastectomy.

Most of the day I have been choking down tears especially after I found out I was estrogen negative. Shanna and Oliver come tomorrow and will distract me from this.