Waiting..... waiting.....

March 11, 2010
Maybe it's a female thing, but I'm not a big fan of waiting. And waiting for final pathology results took a toll on my nerves. The longer I waited, the worse I expected the results to be. What were they afraid to tell me?

Dr Ward had already given Peter and my daughter, Francesca, a report on the surgery. They swear I was awake and participating in this conversation, but quite frankly they could have been talking about gay penguins in Antarctica and I wouldn't have remembered. She had taken out the mass, got nice, clean margins and removed several lymph nodes. It had all gone to the pathologist and she'd get back to us soon.

Up until now, I had deliberately kept away from the terrifying world of internet research. Too much information, much of it irrelevant and why scare myself to death reading about things that might not apply? HOWEVER, I'm not totally clueless and I knew that the lump/mass/tumor/my very own lobular was coming out and also the good old sentinel node, first one to drain the breast. But Dr Ward had removed several lymph nodes. Why and what did that mean?

Two thoughts came to mind: maybe the nodes were in a clump and she couldn't get just one. That seemed unlikely. Dr Ward is a first rate breast cancer surgeon. If anyone knows the job, she's the one! The only other option was that maybe the sentinel node wasn't 'clean' so she had to keep going down the line. While you're strapped to the OR table, the surgeon sends off bits to the pathologist to check that the margins and nodes are clean, so they know before sewing you up that they've got everything.

I heard a little alarm bell. Things weren't sounding quite so simple.