So Then...

I called my mom. I turned into a blithering idiot as soon as I heard her voice. I was quite a site sitting my car out side the radiology clinic shoulders heaving with every sob. It took me a while to calm down enough for her to even understand what the heck I was talking about. Then she started to cry, though she did keep it pretty together considering, we talked for a while. Once she was able to get me thinking somewhat clearly we hung up and I started driving, where to I wasn't quite sure. I wasn't really ready to deal with making doctor appointments and telling my boss and the million other things that needed to be done, so I went to the super market. I figured if I had to have cancer I could go to the store and get whatever the hell I wanted. I think I got cream soda, string cheese, and a bunch of ice cream. I must have been a sight, crying hysterically pushing my cart around the store. But it got me to a point where I could start to think about doing the things that needed to be done.

What DOES Need to be Done?

What do you need to do next? Get home safely, that's my advice. Hopefully someone will be with you and that won't be such a huge concern. For me the thing to do was to get all my li'l ducks in a row, I wanted a plan of action and wanted one right that second. Unfortunately it takes a while to get to that point. Really the first thing you need to do, is call your primary care physician and tell him/her the results of the mammogram so that they can get the referral process started. The faster you can get the ball rolling the better, cancer is a speedy sucker and once it becomes a mass it really moves.

Your Referral

Your next referral will most likely be to a breast surgeon. For me, this was the most important and influential doctor I dealt with. Since I had been in Texas for so short a time I was really counting on my primary care physician to refer me to a great doctor, which he did. If you have the opportunity research doctors in your area and find a doctor you like. Your breast surgeon will not only be the person who helps you the initial decisions about your treatment, this will also be the doctor that does your lumpectomy or mastectomy, and the doctor that refers you to your oncologist if you are going to need chemo therapy. If you are comfortable with this person to begin with it will make that first visit to him/her much less scary.

How I Got the Ball Rolling

There were so many things that needed to be done before I had a plan of action and for a while all I knew was that I had cancer, which just freaked me out all together, I was a complete mess. I need a plan, a way to deal and I felt like I…hell, I don’t really know how I felt, I just wanted things to start happening and happening quickly.

After my experience with my radiologist I was a little gun shy, and was reluctant to call my primary doctor for a referral. When I told him what happened he cried with me and assured me that my breast surgeon would be much different. The doctor he referred me to was extremely busy and it wasn’t until the next week that I was able to get in to see her and even then she had to squeeze me in between procedures on a surgery day. I met her at her office, which was normally full of people, but because she saw me on a surgery day the office was empty, and I think that made the appointment easier. This first appointment was really just to discuss the mammogram and treatment options; there was no exam that day. She was calm and her voice was empathetic, she took it slowly and made me feel safe. She looked at my mammogram, looked at me, and started talking. She was very honest with me and I can’t tell you how comforting that was. She told me that you really need to have a thorough exam, a sonogram and a tissue biopsy for a true diagnosis but in looking at my mammogram she was just going to proceed as if those things had already been done because she already knew what she was looking at and didn’t want to waste any time. We went over two different treatment options, neither of which sounded great, but at least I had options. My first option was to do a radical mastectomy with limited chemo and maybe no radiation, this would mean losing one if not both of my breasts, but there would be very little chemo and possibly no radiation. Now you’ve got to understand that the only part of my body that I even remotely liked at the time was from my neck to my breasts, not to mention the fact that I was 32 and single. I know that sounds trivial and a bit vain given the circumstances, but you think about these things. To be quite honest I was more scared about losing my breasts than I was about having cancer and just the thought started the tears. My second option was to remove the tumor and surrounding tissue (what is known as a lumpectomy), to dissect the lymph nodes under the left arm, determine how involved they were, and removal if necessary, and then proceed with extensive chemo and radiation therapy. Though the thought of chemo and radiation therapy scared the “you know what” out of me, but I didn’t want to loose my breasts either. It seemed to me that the mastectomy would be the most through way of getting rid of the cancer but my doctor told me that that was not that case. In her research she discovered that if recovery rate for both options were exactly the same, so I opted for option two and made my next appointment.