Angst

ooohhh-kayyy….. Tomorrow St. Joesph’s radiology department is supposed to puncture my boob to see if I have cancer. It’ll be the middle of next week, at best, before the result comes back; a miracle if it reaches the Mayo Clinic surgeon by the time I’m supposed to meet with him for a second opinion. I’m pretty well decided that if surgery is needed (as seems increasingly likely), I’ll have it done at the Mayo, simply because their safety level is much higher. However, if several weeks of daily radiation treatments are required, I will ask if that can be done at St. Joe’s, which at least is within driving distance. From my house, the Mayo is halfway to Payson; even if Medicare covers this entire flying circus, I still couldn’t afford the gasoline to drive out there every day for five to eight weeks.

Meanwhile, students are turning in papers today. My assistant is junketing in China, so the entire task of reading these golden words falls to me. I’ll have to read frantically, well into the night, to get through the stuff. Eight (of twenty-five) classmates have posted their papers so far. The things aren’t due until midnight, meaning the bulk of these things will have to be read when I’m in pain, scared, and definitively NOT of a disposition to spend my time on student drivel.

I’d resisted reading the radiologist’s report myself, preferring to just fork it over to Young Dr. Kildare and the beloved Old Guy at the Mayo. But yesterday I thought I’d better take a look at it.

Googled the terminology she used to describe the two lesions and discovered exactly why YDK disagreed with beloved OG@theMayo about the urgency of moving forward. Holeeeee shit! The radiologist’s alleged 50-50 chance of the things being benign (read “50% chance of malignancy”) appears to have been very optimistic. The probability that these things are cancer is higher than 50%. Possibly much higher.

Picked up paperwork to make my son a signer on my credit union accounts. This will make it possible for him to pay the bills if I’m incapacitated, whether for awhile or permanently, and it also will make it a great deal easier to access what will be his funds should I croak over. He’s already listed as a beneficiary for those and for the Fidelity IRA and brokerage accounts. Fortunately, I’ve dawdled endlessly on withdrawing the cash value from my semi-defunct whole life policy, so the insurance payout is still in force; he’ll get 40 grand from that, in the croaking-over event. So he’ll have enough to dispose of my remains and then some. Quite a bit some.

Unless he’s been reading this blog (which I doubt), he doesn’t know about the current flap. I’d prefer not to enlighten him until I know what the real story is. His dad, a notary public in addition to his corporate lawyerness, has refused to notarize the credit union documents. How the hell I’m going to persuade the kid to drive out to the credit union on Saturday to get his signature enrolled with that outfit without having to tell him what’s up escapes me.

At any rate, when (and if) that’s accomplished, all that will remain will be to figure out what to do with the dogs. I think my son will take them temporarily — for a week or two — if I  have to have part or all of my boob lopped off and endless radiation or chemotherapy administered. But after that: ????  I can’t imagine he’ll want to take on two corgis, now and forever, in addition to his marginally manageable adolescent retriever.

Why the fuck do these things ALWAYS happen when things are finally going smoothly and you just start to think you’ve got a grip on your life and you’re going to be preternaturally happy for awhile?

So it’s back from the extra trip to the mammography unit, where the radiologist says she and her ultrasound lady found two “nodules” which she believes to be dangerously suspicious. She explained all the reasons she thinks these things could be boob cancer, and she made good sense. So now they want to schedule a needle biopsy and, if that turns out positive, surgery.

Ducky. As if I didn’t have enough on my mind.

She said the chance that they’re benign fibroadenomas is about 50 percent. That, of course, means there’s a 50 percent chance that they’re cancer. Doesn’t sound like great odds to me. Because these are new growths, because of my age, and because I have never taken hormones, the likelihood that they’re malignant is elevated.

Look into this and you discover that benign fibroadenomas in old bats like me may (or may not) be precursors of actual breast cancer:

Women diagnosed with benign disease do appear to have an overall modest increase in risk for subsequent development of breast cancer, particularly for more hyperplastic or epithelial (the covering or lining) proliferative forms. However, the evidence regarding the risk of breast cancer for non-proliferative conditions is conflicting. Some research found that the risk of breast cancer for women with non-proliferative disease is about double that of women without benign disease (Bodian 1993b), while others find that lesions with no proliferative changes were not associated with an increased risk (Oza 1993; Henderson 1996; NBCC 1999). According to Hurley (1997), atypical hyperplasia is a risk factor, but is not with certainty followed by breast cancer; risk applies to both breasts, with greater risk on the affected side. There is no means to predict which women will go on to develop breast cancer and the effectiveness of current screening and management methods is unknown. Further complicating a physician’s ability to predict a woman’s risk for breast cancer is that most women do not have a history of biopsy for a benign lesion (Bodian 1993c; NBCC 1999).

Isn’t that informative!

Hm. Interestingly,  neurofibromas (a hereditary condition which I happen to enjoy) can also appear in one’s boobs, and they can be mistaken for fibroadenomas. And lo! These things are on the same side as the neurofibromas that infest my shoulder. Wish I’d known that…I would have pointed out the shoulder lumps to the radiologist. Oh well.

What a damn nuisance. You know, the truth is, I don’t really much care whether I live or die. My life is essentially over now, and I’m not at all afraid of dying. Nor do I imagine I have much of anything left to do on this earth: I fill my hours with frantic busywork mostly to pass the time. What does scare me is the prospect of suffering the way my mother did with her cancer…and with her incompetent quack doctors. Truly, I would cheerfully die right now, today, rather than suffer the way she did.

Because I’m all by myself and there is no one here to help me, the hassle factor is almost more than I can bear to contemplate. The biopsy is nothing, but if, as seems fairly likely, they decide these things are cancers, the upshot will be lumpectomy and radiation therapy, according to the radiologist.

That means an overnight stay in the hospital plus God only knows how long to recuperate enough to get back to a normal life. None of the sites I’ve looked at say how long it takes to recover, but I would assume it will be at least a couple of weeks… Evidently long-term pain and numbness of the arm, plus some other uncomfortable and weird manifestations, are possible. The radiologist seemed to be saying they would perform radiation therapy at the time of the surgery, but all of these sites talk about five or six weeks of radiation therapy.

So. At the outset, someone will have to take care of these dogs, since I will be unable to do so for at least several days and possibly longer than that. Someone will have to take care of the pool, which is merrily going green — I have to do battle every day to keep the algae blooms under control, because I was too damn lazy and cheap to drain the thing and refill with fresh water last winter. Probably someone will have to run to the grocery store at least a few times to get me some food. And of course all these little projects I’ve been doing, trying to get books published and the incoming giant index and the various other editorial projects are going to have to go away, to the loss of at least a couple thousand bucks. If I’m unable to function well enough to teach my classes next semester, that’ll be another $4800 out the door.

Ugh. Just what I need to make my day!