First off, I want to thank everyone for the mountain of well-wishes and sweetness I’ve received. From people who don’t know me but found my blog, to family members who waited in the waiting room or by the phone, and everyone in between, I’ve been humbled and overwhelmed by all of the messages of hope that were sent my way. That had to have helped. At the very least, it made me feel loved during a time in which I needed a little love.

The first few days were pretty intense, and are very blurry in my memory. I woke up groggy and numb, but aware enough to recognize an old neighbor among the many nurses milling about the post-op room. (What a nice surprise!) For the most part, the hospital staff was all very helpful and professional. I will say that my first floor nurse was a little socially inept. Once finding out I was a psychologist-in-training, she wanted to have an in-depth conversation with me about helping her friend through the grieving process (mere hours after my surgery), and at 2AM tried to insist that we sing my favorite song. When I wouldn’t, she proceeded to pick “Hakuna Matata” from the Lion King to sing for the rest of her shift, trying to get me to join in. That’s when I pressed the morphine drip for some extra help with coping.

The drains coming out of my body having been the hardest part. They are uncomfortable and always in the way, besides just being disgusting. My hope is that I’ll get most (ok, if we’re taking hopes, I’ll go for all) of them removed this next Tuesday at my post-op appointment. My surgeon said the chances of having them all removed at 2 weeks post-op is remote, but I’m hoping anyway. I’m not super looking forward to the act of having them pulled, but I can’t wait to have them gone. All in all, though, my recovery hasn’t been all that painful. For the last few days, I’ve only used my painkillers at night. I’m a little more active each day. Key word here is little; today my big activity, which wore me out, was a 5 block walk. Every day, though, feels a little easier, and I feel a little closer to myself. So far even emotionally I feel just fine. The trick now is not to overdo it — I’m supposed to be restricting my arm movements as much as possible at this point, and that’s hard to remember sometimes. However, this is absolutely made easier by my sweet family. My mom and sister have both taken their turns staying with me and waiting on me hand and foot, and Brian has become an expert in caring for my drains while minimizing the pain.

So, since surgery, I’ve gotten both good news and bad news. I’ll start with the bad news, because I think the good news is bigger and more important.

In my post Two steps forward, one step back, I talked about how my heart had been damaged by the treatment I had been getting. The hope was that my heart muscle would strengthen within a month, and I could resume my treatment the week after surgery. On Monday, I went in for an echocardiogram to see if that had happened. It hasn’t yet. My oncologist got me in to see a cardiologist right away, but turns out there was a good reason why he had an opening the next day; he was quite possibly the worst doctor I have ever seen. He came in wearing a track suit (I will readily admit that I might have found this endearing had I liked him), rarely made eye contact, interrupted me every time I spoke even if I was answering his questions, and questioned every piece of my (very standard) treatment plan, including the fact that I’ve gotten both a lumpectomy and a mastectomy. He also admitted to me that he knew really nothing about cardiomyopathy that is caused by chemotherapy except what he had read that morning, and that he hadn’t read much. He then went on to tell me that (despite admittedly being ignorant on the subject), I would clearly be foolish to continue with any of my treatment plan, including radiation, and if I did I wouldn’t last twenty years. He did a lot of derisive head shaking and very little listening. I wasn’t impressed, and won’t go back.

So my oncologist and I have come up with another plan. We will give my heart another month to recover. I feel good about this, since during this month, my heart won’t have to undergo a major surgery like it did the last. In the meantime, we will find and schedule an appointment with a cardiologist who specializes (or at the very least is familiar with) chemotherapy-induced cardiomyopathy. This will likely be in Spokane or Seattle, since Missoula doctors need to be a little more generalized. If my heart doesn’t “bounce back” within a month, I’ll see the specialist. If it does, I can cancel if I like. I’m pretty confident we can figure this out, and that this is just another hiccup in an otherwise pretty smooth process. From the (somewhat limited) research I’ve done, this isn’t a rare hiccup in my specific treatment plan, which, like I said, is the standard treatment for the type of breast cancer I have.

Okay, now for the good news. Remember how I was lamenting that some stranger was going to dissect my breast tissue for evidence of disease? Turns out, that stranger is my new BFF. My surgeon called me late last week and told me that they found a little bit of DCIS hiding out in the ducts. That’s not a surprise — we knew we hadn’t gotten it all during my first surgery, and while DCIS is localized and practically precancer, it also isn’t very receptive to chemotherapy. But so, it’s fine that it was there, because it’s gone now, due to my mastectomy. In the right breast, there was nothing but benign tumors. In the lymph nodes? Nothing. Remember that two of my lymph nodes were positive for cancer before, so there was this potential it could have spread throughout my body? Well, it doesn’t look like it did. It looks like all of those months of chemotherapy, all the nausea, all the fatigue, all the irritation and terrible itching…. those months were worth it. They did their job. And because the DCIS that was found has been removed… it’s possible I’m cancer free right now. We still plan to do radiation, in case there’s some undetected rogue cells somewhere, and because that’s part of the treatment that’s associated with the most positive outcomes, but it’s possible I have no undectected, rogue cells. It’s possible I’m sitting here, typing, for the first time in who-knows-how-long, without a trace of cancer in my body.

And that’s worth all of it.