The Mysteries

The pathology report is full of mysteries, and the surgeon says, Do you have any questions, secretly hoping that you don't. O please please don't have any questions, she's silently begging, that's why I'm standing up instead of sitting down and not caring what your mother's name is. (Our friend the costumed activist has a sister who's a doctor in a small Northeastern state. Her employer, the largest medical institutition in the state, has informed her that she spends too much time with her patients. And, horror of horrors, she SITS DOWN with patients. Stand up, girl, the bosses are telling her.)
L alleges that the oncologist tomorrow will answer all. We'll see. It makes me angry that the report is deliberately written to obscure. Would it kill them to have a glossary attached? Or to double-space the report so that you'd have room to write notes? I have Stage 2a, which I always thought I had. Why did the physician assistant have to go out of the room and check this? Wouldn't she have it right there at hand? I have lobular carcinoma in situ, which has a 20 percent chance of showing up in the other breast. I also have invasive breast cancer, which is 15 percent likely to show up in the other breast. Are these calculated together or separately, meaning do I have a 35 percent chance of getting some kind of cancer in the other breast? The largest tumor is 4 cm. My tumors dine on estrogen and progesterone. That sort of tumor-diet is more common among the post-menopausal. I am a meno woman, never pausing, bearer of the never-ending period, it flows from a normal cycle into a pseudo-period egged on by the fibroids. Without chemo, I have about a 70 percent chance of not getting cancer again. The thing, Dr. Susan Love points out, is you have to find out what your chances are *with* the chemo and "without* and figure out if chemo's worth the difference. Between each appointment with The Expert, you think: This One will explain all... I think I will get a second chemo opinion.

I still have to wear the damn tubes, which hurt when I walk.

This cancer is starting to wear me down.