Stupid Ice Cream. All your prailines and creamy goodness that would, on a normal day, make me feel better.. but instead you decide to make me feel like vomiting after taking 3 small bites. I detest you.
So Friday my mom and I went to Walter Reed to hear the real results of her biopsy. She officially has breast cancer- Invasive Ductal Carcinoma. It is the most common one, about 80% of women who have breast cancer have this form. But let me backtrack a little to Thursday…
….Thursday around 11am one of the nurses in the BC center at Walter Reed called my mom at home and told her “Tammy it’s really bad. The worst kind you can get…” she said something about it being in the 4th stage… blah blah.. SO of course my mom is TOTALLY devestated. She called all her sisters, my grandpa and grandma… I had to leave work super early because my sister called and said she was in shambles….
So Friday we go to Walter Reed. Meet with EVERY doctor/surgeon she will be dealing with throughout her surgery and recovery, etc. They basically told her that it was very aggressive, and has grown quickly in the past year.. the tumor behind her left breast is the size of a baseball. But they also told her that they wouldn’t be able to find out how bad it really is (i.e. what stage it is in exactly) until they open her up, remove the tumor and excise some lymph nodes to test those. If it has spread throughout her lymph nodes, it could be considered stage 3 or 4. Just depends on how bad. She has made the decision to remove both breasts so that there is a far less chance of the cancer coming back. Especially given our family’s history with breast cancer, heart disease, colon cancer… the list goes on. God it is going to suck when I get old!
But needless to say. That stupid nurse needs a swift kick in the ass for calling when she wasn’t supposed to and making my mom freak out like that. It IS bad. But it is not impossible to get rid of it. She isn’t going to die. At least not anytime in the next 20 years or so.. unless something else bad happens.
She is doing much better now though. She has accepted it, and knows that theres not much she can do now except fight! She has an appointment today to talk to the Plastic Surgeons about breast reconstruction and to a genetic counselor about getting tested for the BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 genes (breast cancer genes). If she has either of those genes, my sister and I will need to get tested to see if we have them. I hope not.
So Friday was a nightmare. My mom ended up being more pissed off than she was upset. The surgeons had no personality and every time she asked them a question, they wouldn’t answer it…. Ugh. But that is over now. So now we just have to wait until they choose a date for surgery.
I realize my post is scattered (much like my brain). But oh well.
