More Appointments

I had to take the day off today to fit in my four appointments.  First stop - my breast surgeon.  She basically said everything looked like it was healing well, and that I don't need to see her again for six months.  I had a few more questions to ask about my post surgery pathology report which we hadn't discussed in the first post-op visit.  Her answers left me a little unsettled, but I'm starting to get used to that.  I don't feel like I'm going to die any minute like I did when originally diagnosed, but I have this feeling that I'm going to be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life, waiting for something to rear its ugly head.  I repeat, I'm super happy that I'm only stage 1.  It means my tumours were small and there was no lymph node involvement.  The negative parts to the diagnosis are that my specimens were grade 3 which means they are fast growing.  My Ki-67 test, which shows how fast the cancer is growing, also confirmed this with a score of 34% which is considered "high". I also found out that lymph-vascular invasion was found locally in the breast tissue during surgery.  What that means is that cancer was found in the blood vessels and lymph channels in the area they took out.  Luckily it did not spread to my lymph nodes and makes me feel like the full mastectomy was indeed the best choice for me.  But, it doesn't necessarily answer the question about the vascular invasion (blood vessels) which is part of the reason I have to have chemo to make sure they kill everything that could be floating around in there.  The reason for the targeted hormone therapy in addition to the chemo, is my HER2 status, which is positive.  HER2 + breast cancers tend to grow faster and are more likely to spread or come back as compared to HER2- cancers.  But, HER2+ breast cancers respond very well to a drug called Herceptin which is a fairly new drug, but apparently has had amazing results in clinical trials.  So, a little more focus on the negatives this time, but it actually makes me want to get on with the chemo that much quicker and continue the war.

My second appointment was fairly uneventful.  You may recall I had to spend an extra night in the hospital because I couldn't void my bladder completely.  The urologist checked me again and this time there was nothing remaining in there so he deduced that it was all the post surgical drugs making my bladder "sleepy".  He told me to have a nice life, ensured me that I did not have cancer of the bladder, and I was on my way. 

Appointment number three was my post-op medi-port check.  The nurse thought is was healing really quickly and she peeled off all the surgical glue/dissolvable stitches which actually made it feel more comfortable.  I think it looks like ass, but she said because I'm fair that it's going to be "colourful" for awhile and because I'm a little bony, it's going to stick out on me a little more and be more obvious.  It's also still tender, but apparently that is normal as well so I was getting no sympathy from the port lady. In fact, she told me some people have been known to get their port inserted and then use it for chemo the next day.  The whole thing grosses me out so I try not to even picture it. 

My last appointment of the day was physiotherapy.  My physiotherapist at Vienna Physiotherapy Associates is super nice, and to tell the truth I don't mind going there at all.  Sure it's sometimes difficult to do the exercises because my arm is so tight, but they let you lie there on the table with a hot pack, massage my arm and shoulder blade, stretch out my arm and allow me time to do the actual exercises that I never seem to have the time to do at home.  Then it's back on the table for more rest and an icepack.  Compared to my life of late, it's like a trip to the spa.