Bras... Ah!

Seriously, all my guy friends who read this, you can skip this, or not, but you may be uncomfy...
Okay, so I finally went in to get fitted for a bra, it's been about 2-3 years since I have, and now that things have settled a bit I figured it was a good time. WonderfulHubby came with me, and we went to the local JC Penney's.  The person who measured me was really nice, and told me I was wearing the wrong sized bra, namely the band size, I was wearing ones that are too small. And then I tried on a BUNCH of bras. Let me tell you, this was not fun. The "bad" side is flat faced and wide, and still fairly firm, so it doesn't squish into the cup like the normal side does, and some of the full cover bras had extra "poof-age" on that side. I had a few mini-panic attacks, but the lady was super helpful, and because no one else was looking in the bra area, WonderfulHubby was able to come and sit in the cozy waiting area just outside the changing rooms, and come in and calm me down when I needed him too. So we ended up with 3 bras that work great, so that is a relief! (We know things may change again after the next surgery, so no point in stocking up a ton.
Also, while I was there, the nice lady was chatting to me about bras, and gave me the following tips:
1- A 10 pound weight change can change your bra size (I was astounded!!).
2 - You shouldn't wear the same bra two days in a row, because that will stretch them out.
3 - You should get fitted every year, just 'cause your body can change a bit even if your weight doesn't. So maybe go get fitted right before your next mammogram, or for your birthday every year... Hmmm, It's an idead

Mini Update

So, I totally got the drains removed the same day as my last post. Thank goodness! So now my total Borg-ness is down to Zero!!
And, after waiting and hunching over for another week, I had permission to stand up straight! And I figured out why she didn't want me to stand up straight: I simply couldn't. She had tightened me up pretty well, so there wasn't any give. So the first day I was about 5 degrees off straight up (and down). The next few days I looked like I was standing up straight, but didn't feel like it. Now I feel like I really can, and it's so nice. It took my back a while to stop aching from hunching over all the time, and I still wear my belt/corset thing to help my tummy from feeling like it's falling apart, though I can go without it for a few hours. And my stamina is coming back, ever so slowly. I can wash dishes all in one go, and vacuum the living room. Though not one right after another, but maybe next week. Heck, really when did I ever do that with any regularity? ;) Starting next week I can start to exercise, though I plan (hope???) to find time to use the treadmill this week. Oh, and my tummy is flat. Really, this a great result of having Breast Cancer. I had a bit of a post-baby pudge started after baby #3, and then had baby #4, and then it started growing after chemo was over, so if you didn't know my situation, you might be tempted to ask if I was pregnant. So now my clothes fit better, and I am ready to get rid of all of my peasant top shirts that I bought to hide my uneven chest and pudgy tummy. I probably just keep a favorite or two, and let the rest go.
As for future stuff: I'll meet with Dr. Chen again in May to schedule my next, LAST, surgery, which should be much quicker and easier to recover from. Woohoo!
And that's all I have to say about that.  :)

Quick update

Surgery went really well. (Or so the doctor says, and I will take her word for it.) On my end, the first day was heck, the second day started out rough, but got better, and by Friday I was feeling pretty ok, all things considered. So when Dr. Chen came to check on me Friday afternoon, she asked if I felt like I needed to stay another night like we had planned. I decided I did not, and was happy to go home with WonderfulHubby after dinner that day (ok, you got me, I generally like hospital food). He relieved my Sweetmom from watching the kids when we got home, which was especially good because she had a regular volunteer assignment lined up on Saturday mornings.
So, the doctors orders were to not stand up straight, or lay flat for two weeks. This is killer on the back, but it prevents the scar from stretching out. Right now I am a week and a half out, and waiting, waiting, waiting. We rented a walker, as per her instructions, so I can get around without completely killing my back. I also have three drains, one for the chest, and two below the tummy incision. The incision on my tummy is from hip to hip, and looks really ugly right now, but in a healthy way, so it's not infected or anything. I also wear a stretchy velcro'd corset thing to hold the incision in place, and help me not feel like my insides are going to fall out. And I have go to tell you, when I have taken it off to shower, that is what it has felt like! Very unnerving.
Been home for almost a week now (a few hours short), and am going in to see the Doctor today. Really hoping she takes the drains out, they seem to be collecting little enough that I think she will. In general, I am feeling pretty well. I am down to only taking one Lortab right before bed, and as long as I take it easy enough during the day, I don't need a nap. If I do nap, it takes me forever to fall asleep.
Anyways, time to leave for the doctor. Thanks for all your support!

Reconstruction!

Tomorrow is the big day. Tomorrow I travel down to the ginormous hospital in Salt Lake City for my reconstruction. Over the last few months I thought and thought about the pros and cons of having Dr. Massey perform my reconstruction. I thought about how fun it would be to travel to the eastern states. But then I thought about the headache that would come with getting the insurance to work with her, worrying about travel plans and where to stay, and whether we would have to pay for WonderfulHubby's airline ticket out of pocket. I worried about who would be able to take care of my kids for so long, and I worried about how my kiddos would handle me being gone for so long (I would have to spend two weeks there to recover before flying home). And I talked to the ladies in my support group, and there are two doctors in Salt Lake who perform the surgery, and both are covered by my insurance!

So I met with the woman doctor, Dr. June Chen back in November, and really liked her, and got the date all set. That was about the time I had my last herceptin (easy chemo) treatment, and my first "regularly scheduled" mammogram. Mammogram came back clear as can be, so no worries there. Anyways, like I said in a previous post, I decided I definitely wanted to go with the reconstruction where they use your tummy fat to rebuild it (called a DIEP). There are other options, but this seemed like the best for me, especially because my tummy is my "trouble area" as far as weight goes.

Now the last week or so, I have been a bundle of nerves. I think I was less nervous when I was going in for my mastectomy, but who's to know for sure. My memory is definitely not that clear... I think what I am worried the most about is the recovery. I have been told that the tummy tuck part of the surgery takes longer to heal than the chest. So, WonderfulHubby is taking two or three weeks off work, and then my mom is coming to stay for a week, and perhaps as that is coming to an end we will see if I need any more help. Today we have kept busy doing laundry, and making sure all the shopping and errands are done. Hopefully WonderfulHubby will get a good night's rest, because we will have to wake up around 4:15 to make sure we get to the hospital for the sign-in time they gave us, 5:30! Me, well, though I prefer getting a good night's sleep, it doesn't matter as much, because I'll be sleeping most of the day because the procedure is so long.

Oh! And Dr. Chen will be removing my porta-cath as well! Woohoo! So that's one less surgery to worry about.

Also, I went in 2 weeks ago to Dr. Okawa to get my tissue expander inflated so that my scar would be smaller. We overfilled, though didn't realize until a few hours later and she had already left the office. It hurt so bad! And the percocet barely took the edge off, and made me feel sick and dizzy! Do I had a miserable couple of days before I could go back in and have her take out the excess. Dr. Okawa was sick the next day, or she would have done it then.

So that is all for now. Keep me and my family in your prayers. I'm going to have a 3 day stay afterwards, and that will be hard on my little kiddos. Thank you!!

New Boobie Doctor

I met with Dr. Marga Massey down in Salt Lake earlier this month (June), about a week after radiation was done. She is this very wonderful doctor who spends her whole time doing breast cancer reconstructions. She has three hospitals she operates out of, and has five offices around the US she regularly visits so that women from all over the US can have an easier time getting in to meet with her and get a consult. She is really neat, and specializes in doing reconstructions with the patient's own fatty tissue. I've done a LOT of research and asking around, and have decided that this is what I want. So I had a very nice meeting with her. She said she was kind of at a loss on what to do with me because I was so informed on the different options. But I am one of the lucky ones who had chemo first, and not surgery first, so I had plenty of time to decide, and wasn't walking into this meeting a nervous wreck.

I'll post again when I get closer to the surgery date. So I think I may be done posting (or feeling guilty about not posting, heh heh), for a while. Love you all. Thank you for all your prayers and support!

Test Results

So I went in for my Herceptin treatment on the last day of radiation. I asked Dr.Hansen how we would know it was all effective. He had forgotten to have me go in and get an x-ray and blood work done after the final "real" chemo treatment, so he wrote me a prescription (order?) to get that done. I went in a couple days later and quickly got that taken care of.

Dr. Hansen's office called about a week later with the results. The office lady left me a message on my cell phone.

Wanna hear the results?

Are you sure?

Okay...

No More Cancer!!!! I am officially in remission!!!

Woohoo!!!

That's one message I don't want to erase, ever.  :)

So, as it stands, I keep doing the Herceptin treatments every three weeks until October (so that I've had it for one full year). Then come November or December I can get the first reconstruction sugery done (there are usually three reconstruction surgeries).  I'll have mammograms on the remaining "real" breast every year, probably for the rest of my life. And life will move on...

Time to catch up!

First things first, I have hair again! It is long enough to shampoo, and to feel the wind blowing through it! I can't tell you how happy I was on the day those things happened! It is not long enough to comb yet, but no worries, it has gotten pretty thick since it first came in. It does throw me off a little though when cleaning up...

How? Well, if I find ponytail holders, my habit is to put them in my on hair until I get to the bathroom to put them away (You can imagine just how wacky my hair looked when I was a teenager picking up 5 or 6 big scrunchies). So I pick up a ponytail holder, subconciously know I have hair again, and reach to put it in my hair. I usually stop about halfway through the motion with a look of chagrin. My hair may be one-half to one full inch long, but that is definitely not long enough for a ponytail holder. :)

Nextly, radiation has started, and finished. I was happy when I met with my Radiology Oncologist and she said I would only have 5 weeks of radiation. Whew! Super glad we got rid of that extra week.

Now, what with me being sick, I didn't go back into the surgeon to get the tissue expander expanded anymore. I was satisfied with it, and didn't want any additional pain I could avoid. So I went in to the visit with Dr. Ingersol's office. She is the radiation oncologist. I met with her, and she noticed I had a skin infection starting around the scar on my left lump(which I had kind of noticed but not thought was anything like an infection until maybe the day I went in to see her). Oh, and it hardly seems like a breast anymore. Seeing as how there's a sack of water making it big, there is no nipple, and really, no skin sensation there anymore. I can feel pressure, but that's about it. Anyways, so Dr. Ingersol marked up the lump to make a border around the infection to see if the antibiotics she was prescribing were working. Then she left me with Aaron, one of the radiologists. Now, there are three radiologists in this office, plus the nurse who works with Dr. Ingersol. The nurse's name is Karen. Then we have the radiologists: Aaron, Darren, and Karen. Crazy, huh?!

Anyways Aaron took me to the simulation room, and explained the process, showed me around, and then got to business (all the while keeping up a steady stream of jokes). This room is just like the radiation room, just the machine only takes x-rays, and doesn't shoot cancer-killing radiation. So, you walk into the room, and there is a table laying in front of a large machine that has a short, fat arm sticking out above the table. They put a special board on the table that has a slight incline. It has a resting place for my head, and stirrups for my arms to go into so they meet above my head, with a vertical bar to hold onto. So I lay on the table, and put my arms up, and because there are lymph nodes in the neck/shoulder area, I have to lay looking slightly to the right so they zap just that area, and not my ear too. So he shot a bunch of x-rays, and made marks. When he was all done, he got out a bottle of ink and a needle, and made me 5 "dot" tattoos. I am going to pretend they are interesting, like microscopic sailing ships. Or maybe, I will get another dot close to the first ones, and add a bit smile for smiley faces. The tattoos are to use to line up with the laser-lights that shine out of the ceiling and walls of the radiation rooms.

Then he took me to get a quick scan done somewhere else in the building, and I was done for the day. I came back a week later to start radiation.

Now, I had 6 areas they started out zapping. Neck/shoulder area from the front, then the back. Then the affected breast from upper/right twice, and the same general area from my left, more shooting straight at my side. Now this arm that is shooting radiation at me has a glass plate with a "+" centered on it. Behind the glass, there are pins that are the approximate size of the fat teeth of a comb, but not tapered. These pins rest right against each other, and there are two sets that meet in the middle. They can move the pins independently and use them to form the different specific shapes that they need to radiate, so I don’t have any overlap in the radiation fields that are right next to each other, and so they don’t zap what they don’t need to. When they would zap my breast from the upper right I could watch the pins move during the zapping, so at least those two zaps got more or a sweeping pattern than a blanket open zap.

Each zap took about 20 seconds. I would come in with my hospital robe and jeans on. The radiologist (whoever it was that day, they all took turns), would hold up a pillowcase (or a piece of fabric about that big) in front of my chest. I would take off my robe, and hold onto the pillowcase while I got onto the table. Once I was on the table with my arms and hands in place, they would fold the pillowcase so it covered the un-affected breast. So I’m all ready, and they move the table with a control to get it pretty close to where I needed to be, and then would nudge the frame I was laying on to get me all lined up with the laser-lights coming out of the walls. They would get me all lined up, and the radiation machine “face” all lined up. They would then turn on a light and mark with a marker the lower end of the neck/shoulder field. I think I was only drawn on more often in high school when I would write all my homework assignments on my hand!

So, they would zap the neck/shoulder top, come in and raise the table and move the radiation machine face around to beneath the table to zap from below. Then come back in and move the table and radiation machine face for the breast zaps. Zap, zap from above right, come in to move the machine face again, and zap, zap the left side. It only took ten minutes, tops. It did take longer on the days my allergies where acting up and I had to cough in the middle of the zapping. I had to fight the reflex to cover my mouth when I coughed. When I did move to cough, they had to come in and re-align me. But they were all very nice about coming in to readjust me when I moved.

So that’s about it for the radiation room. They had a waiting room back in their hallway of the hospital. The waiting room had a restroom and two changing rooms right off of it. They had a tv, and a big puzzle set up, in case you ever had to wait very long. It was one of those harder puzzles. The first day I looked at it, I could find any pieces to match up, and I was so frustrated I wanted to box it all up and start with a different one. After that I readjusted my expectations to be happy if I even placed one if I ever had to wait very long. That made it very much less frustrating.

I met with Dr. Ingersoll once a week. She would check on my progress, and how my skin was reacting. It developed into a pretty bad “sunburn” on the areas that really never saw the sun. I am ever so thankful that has healed up now to just funny looking tan lines. The last week of radiation I started to realize how hard it was getting on my body. I didn’t do much during the day just keep an eye on the kids and play on the computer, so I didn’t notice. Then I took my girls for a walk around our little block. I hadn’t even made it the corner only three houses away, when I felt my legs and arms just telling me how exhausted they were. After that I decided to stop feeling guilty about my computer time until I was done with radiation, and really my body told me it was okay to do more.
And that’s radiation.