Okay, so WonderSurgeon is at last convinced, and so am I, that the best thing to do is to have the boob OFF, and better yet, to get them both off so as to bring a stop to concerns about the other breast and so I don’t have to spend the rest of my life lopsided.
It’s taken a while to get to this point.
Last week (was it only last week?) I went in to see the radiation oncologist. By then WonderSurgeon and I had decided to keep the boob and do radiation and aromatase inhibitors. This new doctor, though, said she would do it but that the chance of recurrence was high and that the side effects I’ve heard about are real. Among them, she said, I will have scarring of the lower lobe of the right lung, which may lead to pneumonitis, which can be life-threatening. Aromatase inhibitors are not yet approved by the FDA for preventive treatment of DCIS, and so they would prescribe tamoxifen, which I have no intention of taking. She remarked in passing that if it were her, she’d have the mastectomy.
So by the time I saw WonderSurgeon, I’d changed my mind in favor of chopping off the boob. Even though I was very certain that I wanted a mastectomy, she wasn’t so sure. She felt there’s a possibility there’s no more abnormal cells in the breast, in which case it would be unnecessary surgery to remove the boob. Between the two of us, the uncertainty factor was enough to give us pause. We decided that she would order an MRI of the guilty boob, slated for next week: if any more mass appears on that, then we would amputate; if not, then we would try radiation and hormone treatment. Neither of us was thrilled with this scheme, but neither of us knew for sure which way to jump.
Well, yesterday she called me up with a new report:
Still worried, she had taken my endlessly troublesome case BACK to her colleagues for another conference. First she asked the pathologist to revisit the samples she had excised and to analyze the results more carefully. Then she asked them for their opinion. And, she said, she was careful to keep her mouth shut and just listen to them.
The consensus, she said, was overwhelmingly in favor of removing the offending boob.
Well, I was relieved.
You know how when you’re worrying about something or thinking about some major project, you’ll wake up in the middle of the night with your brain spinning on it — with no hiatus between awaking and starting to think on the issue? Well, that happened a two or three nights ago. I woke up about 4 in the morning with a perfectly formed thought in mind: Trying to save this breast is the wrong thing to do!
It seemed as perfectly obvious as the dogs sleeping on the bed next to me. I do not want my chest irradiated. I do not want my lung scarred. I do not want pneumonitis, for godsake. I do not want to run the risk of fractured ribs, new soft-tissue cancers, leukemia, and some blood disorder whose name I can’t even pronounce. I do not want my life disrupted for another four to six weeks with daily trips to the hospital for radiation treatments. I do not want to take aromatase inhibitors that will thin my hair and give me joint and muscle pains on top of the nearly crippling back pain, thank you very much. And I most certainly do not want to take tamoxifen!
Furthermore, I do not want to wait five or ten years until a new DCIS, probably harmless, is found in the other breast and then I have to go through this entire nightmare circus again! I do not want to go around lopsided, having to stuff plastic or fabric prostheses in an empty bra cup in an attempt to look normal enough not to frighten small children. And I do not care whether I have blobs of flesh hanging off my chest, because I’m not a young girl anymore and I’m not in the market for a man.
At four a.m., I could not think of how to tell WonderSurgeon about this revelation without making her think I’m crazy. So I decided to wait until the MRI revealed more mystery tissue in there, which I felt pretty sure would be the case. If it didn’t, then I’d cross that bridge when I got to it.
So, weirdly, her call to deliver what she thought would be received as bad news was really very good news.
I told her that I had quietly come to the same conclusion. She sounded relieved that I didn’t burst into tears or some such stupid thing. Then I asked if she would take both boobs off, so as I could be the same on both sides and so we could be certain that no recurrence would appear in the contralateral (medico-talk for “the other”) breast. She agreed to do so. And she even folded on the “no goddamn reconstruction” topic.
We’re keeping the MRI on the schedule, but instead examining the contralateral boob so as to see whether there’s any DCIS in there. She said there was only about a 3% chance that would be so. I reminded her that every time we’ve had positive odds, I’ve managed to defy them. Pessimists drive the poor woman nuts. 😀
Do you realize what this means?
No. more. effing. mammograms. EVER AGAIN!
And….this is the best part…
I will never, ever have to shop for a goddamn brassiere again!!!!!!!!!
WAHOOOO!
What an arduous journey this has been for you. Sounds like a sensible solution to (non-doctor) me. Glad your surgeon agrees. Best wishes for no further problems and as easy of a recovery as possible. No more bras or mammograms FTW!
Funny, glad to hear you have come to a comfortable decision for yourself! And lo and behold, Wonder Surgeon agrees with you on all matters, or is at least willing to accept your choices.
Wishing you the very best [gotta say – so far your body has not paid attention to us out here – so tell it to listen up] in the coming surgeries and recovery!