Starting Chemo October 2009

Philippa: good luck with your checkup this week. I had my three-month follow-up with my medical oncologist last week. Everything was good, including the tumor markers. This Friday I have my six-month breast ultrasound and mammogram. I'm very anxious about that. A friend who had a mastectomy 31 years ago tells me that the anxiety surrounding mammograms has never gone away for her. 

JoJo: you do look beautiful in your new avatar. You're like a madonna (not the singing one!).

Suzi and Shelby: you are two strong women to be handling divorces on top of everything else you've gone through in the last year. Good luck to you both.

I decided this week that I would sort out all my bc-related paperwork and put it into order. I want to create a folder with all my test reports, etc. and references to where to locate pathology slides, mammogram film, etc. I think this will be a good way for me to wrap up this strange year and also if I need the records down the road (and of course hoping I never do) then I'll be able to locate them easily. Does anyone have any tips for filing their bc records efficiently? I'm not sure whether to just put them all into a folder chronologically or to sort them by treatment phases - biopsies, lumpectomy, chemo, rads. At the beginning of this process last year, I started scanning everything and puttting them all into a single PDF files but since they were mostly image files, that file became too big and unwieldy. My plan was to have everything in one PDF file on a USB stick.

I was back for my six-month mammo today. The Rx was for a mammo of the left breast and a bilateral ultrasound. I questioned whether the right breast should be mammo'd too as the last time it was done was April 2009 at the beginning of this whole bc story. The tech checked with the radiologist who said they would do the right breast also. I could see tech paying a lot of attention to something she was seeing and when she called me back in for another couple of images, I really started to panic. Next I went for the ultrasound. Then the doctor came in and did a breast exam and reviewed the ultrasound images. She told me they found something suspicious in my right breast. The area is centered around a clip marking the site of an MRI-guided biopsy that I had in June 2009. The pathology came back benign at the time. She said it might be scar tissue from the biopsy but the only way to know for sure if to biopsy the area again. So I'm scheduled to have an u/s guided biopsy on Tuesday. I keep telling myself that it's too soon to see a new cancer appearing. Another little voice says maybe it was there all the time and they missed it the last time they biopsied the area.

I'm so happy for me too. I've been a pig this evening. Isn't it funny how we (I) can find any excuse to overindulge in food -- whether it's good news or bad news. I rounded out my piggishness with two Carvel sundaes. Ah, tomorrow is another day. Back to walking and trying to eat right.