Surgery

On Friday, July 11th, we had to be at the hospital by 7:30 am for surgery at 11:15.  Even though I wasn't supposed to eat or drink anything after midnight, I had permission to take a Xanax to help me get through all the prep.  After getting all the right arm bands, my first stop was radiology....again with the painful mammo machine.  I still had all kinds of bruising from the biopsy!  It took a few tries, but they had to locate the titanium clip that had been left behind with the biopsy.  After zeroing in on the right spot, they gave me a couple of shots of local anesthetic to numb me so that they could insert a larger needle/probe.  The goal was to reach that titanium clip with the probe then leave behind a tiny wire that would help Dr. Barber get to the right spot during surgery.  Then a bunch of blue dye was shot into my breast, also to help identify "stuff" during surgery.  During this process Dr. Sharma shared that I was the subject of some discussion at the doctors' meeting the evening before.  She said she felt like she already knew me.  It's always interesting to hear a doctor tell you that...not necessarily in a good way.    

I made it through these first steps without incident, and was calming down a little.  Then another tech arrived from "Nuclear Medicine" (who knew there was a Nuclear Medicine department at the hospital??) and they had the first doctor give me two big shots of the radioactive fluid right outside the areola.  The purpose here was to identify the sentinel lymph nodes, and see how the fluid traveled from my breast to the nodes close by.  After all of that they had to squeeze me into the mammo machine yet again.

I was then wheeled to another area where I had to have three minute pictures taken in a machine that looked like an MRI machine but was silent.  The tech then marked up the location of my nodes on my skin.

Finally I was wheeled to my pre-op prep room, met all the friendly nurses, received my IV, met the anesthesiologist, and talked over everything again with the surgeon.  The last thing I remember saying was, "Oh!  I think it's working. I feel fuzzy, like I just chugged two glasses of wine."

I woke up back in the same room, and was immediately cold with chattering teeth.  They gave me the same blankets as when I had both C-sections: clear plastic made like giant bubble wrap hooked up to a fan that blows warm air into the blanket.  As soon as I could talk, Chris was there and told me what I absolutely did not want to hear.  During the surgery it is customary to get an initial pathology on the nodes removed.  Apparently I have two sentinel nodes, of which both were removed, and in which they found cancer in one.  The wind was knocked out of me.  This automatically took me from Stage I to Stage II.  I know that it could be a lot worse, but THIS already seemed much worse than what the initial thinking had been.  So far, it seems that the odds are not in my favor.  Statistically, I shouldn't have breast cancer.  Statistically, a small percentage of women have the Her 2 positive results, while being ER/PR negative.  Statistically, the MRI results should have been found to be true during surgery.  And, why didn't the MRI see any cancer?  I assumed it was because there were trace amounts that could not be seen by MRI, but regardless, the cancer had moved beyond the breast and I was scared.