Wednesday - Oncologist appointment today

I woke up this morning to a gorgeous sunny day.  Yesterday, my girl K had her ultrasound and found out they are having a boy!  I have one project already ready to go (no, have not started it yet, but have all the stuff)  and now that I know it's a boy I came up with the color scheme for the OTHER project that I had in mind.  He is due around Thanksgiving.  Unfortunately that is ALL I will reveal here for now, since I can't risk K reading this and finding out what my plans are!

I have my oncologist appointment today, my voodoo witch doctor, hence the photo for this post.  I LOVE this voodoo doll.   I almost can't bear to use it, but maybe if I get desperate enough I will burn it.  I'm hoping we will not get to that point.

At this point in time, I know that I will have to have some form of chemotherapy - Herceptin at the very least, to counter act the HER2/neu receptors that were very high on my biopsy report.   Although I haven't done a ton of  reading about it, from dealing with my Rheumatoid Arthritis, I understand the concept that this is something in my body (again!) that is acting inappropriately and getting all cranky and agitating the cells in my body to grow like cancer.  If you want the less technical version of what I just described here is a link that gives some information that might be useful : http://breastcancer.about.com/od/diagnosis/p/her2_diagnosis.htm


....Additionally, because of the size of the tumor, I'm in the Stage 2 category, but luckily have no evidence of the cancer having spread to the right breast or the lymph nodes, I willl most likely get some other form of chemotherapy to make sure that any other misbehaving cells in my body don't get uppity and start forming cliques elsewhere.  again, sorry to be so technical, but I AM an analyst!

That is the BIG excitement on the cancer front this week.  Next week, Monday, I go in to the hospital to do my pre-surgical screening.  I tried to go in on Tuesday, my birthday, but they didn't want to get me a cake, so I agreed to come in the day before.  Brian will be in Atlanta on business, but I'm pretty confident I can drive to the hospital for some routine tests to determine if I'm fit to go into surgery next week.  As long as they don't try and give me an IV--- AGAIN, I should be fine.  

My surgery is scheduled for July 26th- High Noon...I want to get the soundtrack from the movie to play as they are wheeling me in....or whatever that one song is that everyone thinks about when you hear the words "high noon"...you know the one....I should probably google it to find out what song that really is, but in the meantime, I'm pretty sure that you know the one I'm talking about!

I'm going with a mastectomy on the left side, followed immediately by the plastic surgeon coming in and putting in a tissue expander under my left pec.   This will allow them to slowly fill in the 'balloon' with saline until lefty is the size I want her.  (the actual size is still under debate in my household- I'll let you guess who is voting for MUCH MUCH BIGGER and who wants 'eh, maybe the same size, maybe a wee bit smaller'.

After it gets to the much-debated "appropriate" size, then I'll go in for another surgery and Dr. Booby will put in the saline implant and do an extreme makeover on righty and I'll be good for a whole new set! 

Happy Birthday to me!

~Santosha