As I have mentioned before, breast cancer is not for sissies. It is a sucky and long process that has many phases. Chemo, while happily over, was a long 4 ½ month phase, but just a part of the overall plan to kill this very nasty, invasive cancer for good.
So what is next? Well Chemo is technically done, but the Herceptin treatment (the drug that really focuses on my type of tumor) continues until September 22. The good thing is that it won’t make me sick or suck up full days of my life - just an hour every three weeks. When that is over, Herbert the uncool medical port will also come out – yay.
And yes, while chemo did its job, I still have to have surgery. No, it is not a lumpectomy. My cancer is too advanced to do anything conservative. The surgery I am having is technically called a bi-lateral modified radical mastectomy. What is modified about it is that they no longer take out all of the chest muscle like they used to in a radical mastectomy. The good news is that it is bi-lateral, meaning one breast (the right). The reason it is only one breast is that a) I do not have the cancer gene, b) there is no sign of cancer in the left breast and c) the chemo worked and shrunk the tumor by about half.
However, they will still do work on the other breast because in the long run – the two need to match (novel concept, huh?) Anyway the surgery is next Wednesday, March 9 at noon at Virginia Hospital Center. I will be in the hospital a day or two and then will recuperate at home with the help of my lovely friends Martha Jo and Tina and many others of you who have volunteered to help (thank you is just not enough to say! But thank you!) I will be out of work a few weeks, and will probably work from home for a bit because of the restrictions on driving and lifting, not to mention not being able to wear a bra for a while (geez! someone could get hurt!)
I will eventually have a complete reconstruction of the right breast and more work on the left. They are not able to do the full reconstruction now because I also need to have radiation, which damages the tissue as it does its work. Basically this is a precaution to make sure they got every stray cancer cell that could possibly be there.
After I am all healed from the surgery and the radiation, then I will have reconstructive surgery where a new breast will be made from my other tissue and the other breast will be adjusted to match it. THEN (yes can you believe there is more) when I am healed from that, there will be a last smaller surgery to do some cosmetic tweaking. Finally, after that, I will be done with surgery at least (I may take a drug to ward off the return of cancer) – and when will all this nasty stuff be done that be?
If I am lucky and everything is flawless, the maybe by the end of the year, or early in 2012. If there are complications or the healing takes longer, then who knows? Yes, all the time I have to give this #@!$ disease really pisses me off. But it is what it is, not much I can do but plow through this crap. What is the other option? Let cancer win? Oh HELL No!
So there you have it – the simple version of THE PLAN. No you can promptly forget what I told you and ask me again later because I am the only one who really needs to remember this crap.
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