Postcard from the edge...of eleven years out...

There are three drawers in my house, all in different rooms, that I avoid whenever possible. The first is the mandatory kitchen junk drawer which contains instruction pamphlets for appliances I haven't owned in years, every vet prescription for animals long since buried in the back yard, chop sticks from a Chinese takeout a mile from home, random strings, coupons for food dated April 2003, an impressive number of wine corks, rotten rubber bands that snap when you use em, assorted and sordid barbecue skewers,-- and the rubble is piled so high it catches on the drawer on top of it.

The second drawer that is a total disgrace is one of the drawers in my night stand where the leftover expired pain medication from the 17 surgeries I had after diagnosis reside, many vials of dry eye stuff tried out during a taxotear outbreak that are dangerously outdated, some odd brown sticky stuff in one corner of the bottom that I hope is spilled coffee, 4 pairs of reading glasses in stages of disintegration, and, inexplicably, a petrified pizza crust.

But the frightening drawer is the bottom one of my computer desk, hard to get to since the shelf with the computer obscures it and it's way down at the bottom, never sees lamplight. Here is where those registers reside that always come with your new checkbook order and are obsolete now thanks to on line banking, and years of photos and newspaper clippings from when my kids scored soccer goals in third grade that I have tossed in there, saving for a photo album for my kids one day at Christmas before they turn 40. Worst of all I have known for some time, underneath everything, my path reports reside.Since I had a surgical biopsy initially, then two lumpectomies without clean margins and then a mastectomy, there are a number (4) of path reports. Some years ago when I created my statistics for the bottom of my posts here, I grabbed the final path report on my mastectomy and recorded the 5 cm etc. mentioned in that report, then stuffed the crumpled paper back under the checkbook bones. Recently I took the whole collection out, thinking I would understand the mystery of those path reports better now, and hoping by reading them in the light of day they would stop that throbbing they do in the corner of my drawer. Welp, I soon realized yesterday I need to add together the various chunks of my tumor from the four times it was excised, and when I did it came out to over 9 cm. Too, I reread the part about the Ki-67, the part that said 75%. I got out one of my pairs of the disintegrating reading glasses to make sure it didn't say 7.5% Nope, it didn't, there was not a trace of a decimal in that sucker. So that is a big mother Ki-67, a bad prognostic feature. Glad I did not appreciate that 11 years ago.

When I read here about somebody with a "worse" bc than mine (whatever that really means), it gives me hope even when my rational brain knows it is irrelevant since we are all different, and one person surviving a bad aggressive nasty tumor does not mean you will. However, despite this dichotomy of thought, I pass this brave foray on to you, that I have taken on my path reports and will be soon amending my statistics at the bottom of my posts.That I dodged a big one and hope you do too. That I have broken most of the rules for having a favorable outcome. That I still feel well. That I still have days when I wig out about all of this.Love to all, Weesa