The Surgeon's Joke.

[smokingboot]

Clear on three sides, but on one side the cancer cells still go on beyond the margin of removed flesh, so here we go again. He warned me there may be an op after this one, because we're doing this by incremental amounts so as to do as little damage to healthy cells as possible.

'Hopefully this will be the last,' he said, adding with a laugh 'unless I discover 5 more inches of the thing of course, ha-ha-ha!'

Ha-ha-ha.

Perhaps not a natural star at the comedy club, still I recognise the effort being made here.

The practical impact apart from the ever present exhaustion and a few stinging bits, is mainly the shower-free regime during the healing time. The wound and dressing must be kept dry for 19 days at least. I do my best with basin baths but there's no denying I feel terribly Tudor... until I look at the pics, and am overwhelmed with relief/gratitude for living right here right now. Reading up on the history of this disease in treatment, I feel for anyone who ever went through this, who still goes through it with no help or care. If I consider too long the loss of so much love and humanity and the sheer waste of it, I might grow very angry at life, death, the world, nature, God, whatever. But here I am staring at photos of my insides while consulting with a doctor as to how to save my life. I may not deserve the miracles of my time and place but I certainly appreciate them.

Here's the progress of the cancer under letrozole, behind the cut (hah! My first ever HTML pun!) Avoid if mammogram pics make you queasy.

The first in August 2023 shows it as a plump unequal little figure 8.



This is the one that caused Mum and Whimsy dismay, Mum unable to keep it out of her voice.

'That's big. How could you not feel it?'

It's not that big, and anyway, it's deep inside the breast' came my answer. Neither I nor the GP could find it. It was the surgeon who, after checking the mammograms, knew where to dig.

The second is January 2024, where the tumour had shrunk to the 'shrivelled walnut' analogy beloved of the sonographer. To me it looked as though the little thing was doing morning stretches. This was the point at which the marker was necessary, the worry being that the cancer would shrink to the point of being undetectable while still being active.



The third is Aug 2024, a year of letrozole treatment. The tumour is clearly much less dense and has an intsy bintsy little waist, looking like an antennae-crowned homunculus reaching its hand out for a dance. A little grotesque, it gives me the sense of belonging in a Tim Burton movie.




It's gone now, leaving those those chiffon-like wisps and tendrils to cause trouble. Some of these contain cancerous cells and have to be removed. Once this is done to the utmost it's blast time with radiotherapy, I think. We won't know if chemo's a thing til the earlier results are returned from the States.

So another op and this one might well affect my ability to party on through Halloween. I went out into the garden, watched the sky and listened to the avian hordes on our roof. Impossible to feel anxious among the happy legions giving their own rendition of the surgeons' joke. Winter looks to be harsh this year, some of those birds may die (though in my garden we'll do our best to avoid that) but in any case given there's no knowing tomorrow, might as well sing today, right?

Comments

[mallorys_camera]

I think yr surgical team is being very considerate. Here in the States, you probably would only have had a single operation because they would have cut well beyond the margin of the cancer, healthy cells be damned.

From what you're writing here, it seems like yr team is striving to manage the cancer surgically so that you can forgo chemo.

Although I suspect if there's lymph node involvement, they will recommend it. Why does the sample have to go to the States?

[smokingboot]

They have been very considerate. I also think my determination not to have chemo influenced the team exactly as you suggest. The option you describe can happen here too (and it's certainly the one my mother would have preferred) but my preference was to keep as much of the breast as possible, and this has influenced their strategy. This choice became more hammered in for me when a fellow sufferer insisted on showing me her post-op scars on the Hanoi night train. She was not well looked after and to this day, I believe she was in shock.

I have softened on chemo since they found cancer in a lymph node. At the moment, the algorithms suggest that taken to the max, the number of people with this cancer spec who benefit from chemo = something like 4 out of 100. I don't know if the NHS maybe farms this out to some private company in the US, and wondered at the time, but there was so much info going down, didn't think to ask!

[summersgate]

Thinking of you as you go through this. "there's no knowing tomorrow, might as well sing today". Yes.

[smokingboot]

Thank you for thinking of me and understanding the singing X

[cathrowan]

Best wishes

[smokingboot]

Thank you