Tuesday I went to the East Ann Arbor Medical Center for my last reconstructive surgery, eager for the relief and healing that lie on the other side of anesthetized sleep. No more surgery. A reclamation of my body. A bit more rebuilding in service of moving on to my life, whole and healthy. A small knot of scar tissue was removed and sent to pathology, just to be safe. Fat was grafted onto new locations to conceal where it had been cut away in previous operations. I awoke in high spirits and feeling rather like I'd been run over. Intense pain or not, here I was sitting at the end of a two-year long operative journey. What sweet relief.
I got a phone call Wednesday afternoon. I recognized U of M's number and answered, anticipating a nurse on the other end asking if I was doing alright, and for a moment I was so touched that my surgeon of the hectic OR schedule would call to check in on me. "Sara," he said in his typical mixture of urgency and gravity, "How are you doing? Is Jason home with you? I have the results from pathology...the tissue we removed is cancerous. You are having a recurrence. Dr. ... will call you within the hour. Are you ok? I'm so sorry. Would you like me to talk with Jason?"
Ok, thank you. Yes. No. no no no no. Yes. No. Thank you. thank you. My voice shrinking, heart racing, hands shaking.
June 11, 2012. Late Monday morning. Jason is at work and I am standing at the top of the stairs, looking out the window when the phone rings. It is the curt PA from my primary care doctor's office, ironically named Joy, calling to tell me I have cancer. Time stops. I call Jason. By the time I manage to drag myself downstairs, he is home. An instant.
In the days that followed we called everyone to tell them The News, saying it so many times over it started to lose its meaning. Phone call after phone call of me, steely and numb on one end, while family and friends were thrown into shock and sorrow on the other.
I made some of those calls again last night, listened to my aunts beg it away and try to rationalize an unpredictable phenomenon that offers no explanation for its presence. It is just here, for no particular reason at all. A trick of replication, a miscommunication, an accident of biology.
This morning a nurse called to let us know that I had an appointment in breast imaging. For a moment I was sure this wasn't my life. I could so clearly see us there, holding hands flat on our backs in bed, staring wide-eyed and groggy at the ceiling, wishing with all our might that we didn't have to get up to go in search of more cancer.
At the appointment, an anxious nurse who clearly had not looked at my chart before coming to see me asked questions about my medical history and failed to hide her surprise at the sheer number and very recentness of my operations. She took me to the same ultrasound room I visited two years ago, where a calm radiologist informed me that a series of precancerous lesions would necessitate a mastectomy. I lay on the same bed in the same position while a new doctor ran the same ultrasound wand over the same breast looking for new cancer. What she found was an ill-defined tumor, warped by the seeping and swelling of the post-operative tissue, and ominous calcification in the surrounding skin.
There are a lot of things we don't know yet, like whether this recurrence is isolated or if it has metastasized to other parts of my body. I will have a bone scan and a ct scan done tomorrow to try to find out. Sometime next week, I will have another surgery to remove the affected skin and to extract and analyze another small set of lymph nodes to make sure they're clean. In a few weeks, when I'm healed from these operations, I'll have an MRI to get more detailed pictures of areas of concern. In the meantime, I haven't the slightest what to do with myself. The air feels syrupy, hours slipping by too quickly and without incident, my emotions on rotation between incredible fear and disbelief, with periodic, unguided anger thrown in for good measure. The waiting is the very worst part.
I am so, so scared.
No comments:
Post a Comment