From the very beginning of this journey so far I have had to take in an astronomical amount of information and make extremely quick decisions with it. Decisions that affect the rest of my life.
Are you going to do Fertility preservation?
Are you going to freeze just eggs or also embryos?
What kind of surgery do you want? Mastectomy or Lumpectomy?
Do you want a double Mastectomy?
What kind of implants do you want? Are you going to do expanders?
Each one of those questions had many side effects associated to them and lots of different pros/cons. Instead of having to make these decisions, my most difficult decisions at this time of my life should be “what’s for dinner?”, “what are we doing this weekend”, “Which bachelorette am I going to?”….. to think those questions even caused me stress at some point! Oh the life I live now.
I sit there in those rooms with 10 pamphlets in front of me and having just listened to an hour session of the Doctor giving me the facts, trying to do a mixture of remembering and writing notes down, all in order for me to make these life changing decisions. Technically you could say I have the resources to inform myself of these things, but after an almost a 6 hour day spent at the hospital plus the emotional stress of reminding myself that Breast Cancer is now my reality, plus all the other decisions I also have to make, it is A LOT. So spending the rest of my exhausted day reading those pamphlets doesn’t seem too appealing. But even if I did, what then? Do I make a T chart of pros and cons? I know I’m not going to get a perfect 2+2=4 equation. (This by the way is the ultimate frustration!) I consider myself to be a very logical person, I excelled in math for a reason – I need objective conclusive answers! None of this wishy washy subjective conclusions. It’s driving me mad that the answers aren’t clear to me.
Within the 5th day after being told I have Breast Cancer, I found myself sitting across the table from a nurse at the Fertility clinic, talking about freezing my eggs because chemotherapy was going to put me into early menopause. 7 days prior I had been looking at hotels in Sri Lanka to finish planning my trip I was about to be going on – with my healthy 29 year old body. I’m pretty sure I woke up on that 5th morning forgetting what was even going on and expecting to get dressed for work. But instead, there I was talking about daily injections to harvest my eggs prior to chemotherapy. What?!
Fertility preservation all sounded like a great plan. I’d spend 2 weeks doing the injections, it would be all fine and dandy, and then I’d have an insurance plan for later in life – sign me up! The insurance plan really appealed to me because the last thing I was thinking of, either before my diagnosis or now, was having children – that was meant for later in life when I “grew up” and became a proper adult. I don’t even know if I’ve even made the connection between my life now and my life later where there are kids and a family. I’ve been under the assumption that I’m still a kid. I can barely look after myself, let alone a little human. But this is great, I’ll pack these eggs away for later use when I’m not a kid anymore….
During the appointment they did my blood work and ovary ultra sound and the Doctors were literally pumped with how fertile I was. They excitedly counted my follicles like they finding out they were winning a virtual game, except the virtual game was the ultra sound monitor. After that positive spin, our mood was cheery, we had pep in our step. It was nice to have a mini victory after what had felt like 5 of the shittiest days. Mark even made fun of the foot pedals on the hospital bed because they were oven mitts (cost cutting measures apparently). For anyone who knows Mark and is wondering, yes, he put the mitts on his hands. We were officially the weirdest people to have come into that place, I’m sure.
But then we got into the paper work and signing away our lives. They started talking through the potential side effects, the risk of overstimulation, and that I could be in pain for a while. We went through a list of these risks and it occurred to me that after all of this, I’d have to dive right into chemo?! Put on the brakes! This doesn’t sound all great anymore. I kept picturing me being in a fetal position in pain and having to pull it together because a few days later I’d be starting chemo, which would kill me all over again. Sign me out. On these forms they also have to put down all the possible long-term side effects, even if there is very minimal data. So things like ovarian cancer was on there. Mark looked at me and said “maybe we need to assess the option of not doing this…..”. How do you put someone before you who you haven’t even met yet? What an odd concept.
Surgery First - halleluja!
Having the surgery first gave us immense relief because not only did we not have to think about chemo right away, but we also got a lifeline to have more time to think about fertility. I can’t tell you how relieving that was. I was so stressed about making that decision that I was surprised I hadn’t broken out in a rash. It was consuming my mind each day and I couldn’t let any other thoughts in. My future kept flashing before me, baby-less, making me re-question the options every time. It was awful.
Although Surgery first was a relief, it was also its own burden – trying to decide what kind of surgery I wanted.... not to mention a mere week to make it. At first, my decision was heavily weighted into doing a Mastectomy. Get that shit out of me, was what I thought. Take it all! What an easy thing to say, right? Not so easy to actually go through with. When you’re young you’re supposed to have the best body of your life, things are supposed to BE there and be great. To think that prior to being 30 years old, I was supposed to lose part of me already.
We met with the plastic surgeon and he explained to us how it was going work. Since I haven’t ever looked into getting breast implants, I don’t know how they work, but apparently it’s common to have the chest cavity muscle be stretched over the implant, as it makes the breast look more natural. Well for Breast Cancer patients who have a Mastectomy, that is the only option. If you take out all of the tissue, there is no method for the blood to flow and to keep the skin and remaining tissue beneath the skin healthy. For this reason, they have to place the implant behind the muscle and allow the muscle to orchestrate the blood flow. Sounds all fine, sure. But then the doctor started talking about how the muscle, now stretched over the implant, could make it difficult to do certain activities such as; Swimming, Yoga, upper body strength work outs…. WHOA stop right there. PUMP on the brakes. Those are my favourite things…..
UGH starting from scratch again, Lumpectomy is BACK on the table.
Cancer is going to take this year of my life from me, I know that, and I’ve somewhat accepted that (still working on it). But I will NOT let cancer take more than that, and it’s certainly not taking away my favourite things. For all I know, I was overreacting to all of this, and for all I know, women can recover from a mastectomy and do just fine with those activities. But once you’ve been hit but such a small percentage (that 0.25% that I mentioned before), you have a tendency to think that you can be hit by ALL the small percentages, no matter how small they are. “….there is a __% chance you won’t get flexibility back in your shoulder”…. Yep that’ll be me. “There is a __% chance that the implant could rupture”…. Yep that’ll be me. “There is a __% chance that radiation will damage the implant”…. Yep that’ll be me. And then they’re all like “but don’t worry, you should be fine, this is only in very rare cases”. Really?! Because 10 days ago my life got turned upside down by one of those small percentages, one of those “rare cases”.
What I hadn’t appreciated, and hadn’t been told up until that point though is that my lump, being in the upper outside quadrant of my left breast, was the most ideal location for a lumpectomy (cosmetic-wise) because any shirt, bathing suit, bra, would cover up the scar. It also is a good location to have the surgeon successfully move tissue around to fill in the gap. Having a lump on the inner area of the breast, towards the chest cavity, can leave a dent or a dimple which is more difficult to cover. It's important to know also that studies have shown there is no survival rate difference or local re-occurrence difference between Mastectomy and Lumpectomy. So the decision for women is primarily a mental struggle (i.e. they want it all gone), or it's a cosmetic struggle. Some women don't even have a choice and have to do Mastectomy due to multiple tumours or spreading of the cancer through the tissue. After all this, I consider myself lucky that I had the choice.
So Lumpectomy it was.
Decision fatigue had most definitely settled in by now. If I had been asked what kind of pizza I wanted for lunch on any one of those days, I probably would have burst.
….On to the surgery and recovery.
Yorumlar