Friday June 6,2008 Follow-up wth Surgeon

Hello Everyone,
I had my 1 week follow-up visit with the surgeon today. He said all the test came back benign on the additional tissue/muscle he took out last week. No cancer cells and no pre-cancer cells. This is GREAT news!!
Actually I don't know if it's from the surgeries I've had and the pain pills or what but I am just not as "on top" of things as I usually am. I told my daughter that they may want to scan my brain to make sure everything is OK there, 'cuz, I've been a little ditsy lately!! So with that said, I honestly had not even thought about possible test results on the new tissue he took. It did not hit me until 2 days ago that "crap, it could come back positive for cancer"!!!!!! Luckily I've been too busy to think about it much and was relieved when I saw him today. He said he left me a voice mail on my cell phone 2 days ago, which I never got until I got back in the car and called my voice mail and Yep, there was a message there from Wednesday from the surgeon!!

I did talk to him about the 2 different types of pain I am having. The 2nd and 3rd days after surgery were pretty good, not much pain unless I moved the wrong way. 4th & 5th day especially were worse. 6th day was better until I had to manhandle my unruly mare, more on that later. And today, the 7th day is back & forth, but this evening it's been hurting pretty good.

The first kind of pain is different from the last surgery in that it's a burning sensation behind my breast. It didn't start until the 4th day and the 5th day was real bad, constant burn sensation. As I headed to bed that night I kept thinking of the saying "feel the burn", "feel the burn". I didn't even have to do anything for this to hurt, it was just there constantly. The second kind of pain was a stinging burn that ran from just below my breast, up the right side, through my armpit and down the inside of my arm about 4 inches.

The doc said that the burn is because he had to take quite a chunk of muscle from my chest wall area behind my breast, along with extra skin from the surface of my breast. The other pain that runs up to my arm pit and then down my arm is probably from a nerve that he nicked during surgery. He said it would eventually go away.
These things all hurt without doing anything and then there is my breast and incision that are a whole other story.
Just so you have a bit of a visual and it might help some of the things I say make more sense . . . the cancer tumor was in my right breast. The first surgery there was an incision under my armpit where he removed lymph nodes and an incision on the right side of my breast, running from my armpit towards my nipple, but only about 2+ inches long. This second surgery he went into the original incision on my breast, but needed to take some of the skin around it, so it's longer in length and runs all the way to my nipple now. Keep in mind I don't have much breast to begin with, so an incision like this on someone with normal size breast might only run half way to the nipple.
So luckily my breast & incision only hurt if they are touched or jolted. If I walk to fast or drive over a bump or that kind of thing . . it hurts. I'm naturally pretty protective of it when someone gives me a hug or something like that. The only 2, or 3 that have actually hurt it by touching it are my cat, Trouble, my nieces dog, Scout & ME!! Oh and I've been getting some sharp shooting pain in there the last couple of days too. I wonder if that's from the nicked nerve??

Some of this may be boring for some of you, but I think this is part of what my blog is all about. If anything I share with you helps you or anyone else to know more about this and what things can and sometimes do happen, then it's all good.

I have an appt with my oncologist on June 16th. So I am sure that is when I'll find out about starting chemo.

Okee-dokee, that's it for this post. I will write more in a bit about some different things including my ordeal with my horse yesterday!!

Keep Smilin'
Wendy