This is just a quick note to let you know that my little warm-up surgery this morning went fine. The butcher removed a fibroma from my ahem, derrière if you must know. Other than a little delay in the morning (not sure why that happened, but I was definitely there on time) everything went smoothly. I spent the day resting and am just about ready to turn in now, as we got up at five a.m. this morning. Needless to say I'm a bit tired.
For those of you who do not yet know, I call this my "warm-up surgery" because I have scheduled a prophylactic mastectomy for March 14. For one thing, I am tired of waiting for biopsies and their results. For another, due to my initial experience with core biopsies, which are essentially sampling procedures, and the false negative it produced (i.e., the pathology report claimed the lesion wasn't cancer when in reality it was -- they simply hadn't obtained a truly representative sample), I never quite fully trust their results.
What is even more important to me, though, is that a study that came out last year showed that while a prophylactic mastectomy of the unaffected breast doesn't provide any survival benefits for most cancer patients, women under 50 who had stage I or II estrogen receptor negative breast cancer (hey, that's ME all over) were the only subgroup that did benefit significantly, increasing their survival rate by almost five percentage points over five years. If you are interested, you can read the study here. Anyway, increasing survival seems like a very good thing to me -- I'm greedy that way, you know! Plus, it seemed like the appropriate way to celebrate my two year cancerversary.
So my mind is made up, and the big surgery is scheduled. Just wanted to get this fibroma thing out of the way, first. The overwhelming odds are that this fibroma is just that, a benign (though somewhat annoying) growth that likes to afflict my delicate rear end. But the main thing is that it is gone now, meaning that I should soon be returning to my usual cheekiness.
Ok, I'll lay off the bad puns now, I promise. As I said, all is well here.
5 comments:
Go go -- nothing like a little nip & tuck to perk things up, right? Pun intended! Big hugs from Princeton, 2L's sister.
Love your sense of humor - you are an inspiration to me and mine!
If you can be as effervescent as you seem to be ( in person and in print ) then how can I let myself get dreary with my (comparatively) minor issues of health and stress?
Prayers in process - as always! From woody rural Schuylkill.
Hi, I was diagnosed triple negative on Valentines day this year. I've elected to have a bi-lateral mastectomy(even though the Dr. said only the right one had to go). After reading what you are going through I'm glad I decided to do it this way. Ironically, my mastectomy is also scheduled on March 14th. You can be my surgery buddy!
Hi Julie,
I'm so sorry to hear that you, too, have been diagnosed with TNBC. There are just far too many women that keep joining the TNBC club...
What a coincidence, though, that your mastectomy is scheduled for the same day as mine! Sure, we can be surgery buddies! Do you have a blog or something? Let me know how to be in touch.
I just started writing a blog. I need to do a lot more work on it but I have a lot of time on my hands now. jdaudelin.blogspot.com.
I found your blog and the fox news reporter Jennifer Griffin's blog to be very helpful. Thank you.
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