Can’t Win for Losin’…

So along about 6 p.m. it’s pouring rain. The power is out. It’s been out for almost an hour. I’m chasing around, don’t recall why, without the battery lantern and suddenly I hear a phone ringing. The land line is mostly populated by walk-around phones, which of course go dead when the power goes down. But one of the phones plugs into the wall.

That’s not the one that’s ringing, though. I run around frantically  in the dark, searching for the extension that’s jangling. Finally realize it’s the base phone for the five wireless extensions.

Pick up the horn, get a bad connection, think it’s an ad.

No. It’s the surgeon.

She wants to do MORE SURGERY!

God freaking damn it!

First, she says: the good news: all the margins for the tumor they removed were negative. It is extremely probable that the thing hasn’t spread around.

That’s nice, eh?

Moving on: It develops that the radiologist who did the biopsy at St. Joe’s was right in speculating that what everyone else thought was two lesions actually was one. Instead of two small tumors, what was in there was a single tumor that’s over two centimeters in size.

This changes the tumor’s grade from 0 to, presumably, 1. And it raises a concern that a large enough margin was not removed.

New 2014 guidelines urge doctors to cut out a much narrower margin around a tumor. Researchers now believe that if the margins are negative there’s no point in hacking out a wide margin. However, this is pretty controversial. In the first place, they seem to assume the patients in question will have radiation or chemotherapy; our plan is for me to avoid that. And second, in the very recent past evidence has shown that wider margins lead to better results with DCIS. Dr. P happens to be in the latter camp. Having discovered that we had one large tumor rather than two tiny ones, she thinks it’s safer to go back in and hack out more flesh.

Relying on her experience and expertise, I agreed to that.

However…it’s just about impossible to tell whether “re-excision,” as this procedure is called, is in fact effective at preventing recurrence, or whether it’s just another unnecessary treatment. Cruise the Web, looking only at sites that seem to reflect peer-reviewed research, and what you find is that no one knows.

This throws a large monkey wrench into the works. Class starts on the 21st; she wants to do the surgery on the 27th. If it’s a repeat performance of the first episode, I should be functional within a day. But believe, me, the LAST thing I feel like doing, even now, is screwing around with an online section of Eng 102 students. I’d planned to get back to chairing my business group — this will bring a stop to that. I haven’t been able to think straight and so STILL don’t have websites, a marketing plan, or anything in place for the book that should hit Amazon within the next few days, or for the other two books sitting on DropBox’s servers. I haven’t heard much back from the subcontractor who’s doing the hateful index, and it will be due, at the latest…yes, right about August 27! I cooked up enough food for the dogs to last a good three weeks — it was a bitch of a job — and that will run out just about as they roll me back into the OR. So now I’ve got to trudge to Costco, buy MORE pounds and pounds of meat, and cook and grind and freeze all that — just what I want to do with another two or three days of my time. Choir season starts on September 3; I have no idea whether I’ll be feeling well enough to go to the first rehearsal, to say nothing of the all-day boot camp. The pool is now COVERED with algae because I haven’t been able to keep up with it. I want to fire the pool dude, who you can be sure will not show up today because it’s raining steadily, because he’s not doing the job and because it’s ridiculous to pay someone 85 bucks a month to come once a week to do a job that has to be done daily. Now I won’t be able to take care of the pool myself for weeks, and the thing will just simply turn green, and there’s no way a weekly visit from some kid is going to stop that.

Damn. It’s like I said earlier: every step along the way is an ankle-twister. Given the track record, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised: it’s just another damnfool thing to go wrong. And I suppose, given the karma surrounding this thing, it’s probably safe to assume that sooner or later it will recur. Maybe sooner than later, eh?