(no subject)
So. What a crappy year was 2011. In May, Greg and I bought a couple of bicycles and pledged to get our lazy butts back in shape. Not two weeks later, I'm being diagnosed with breast cancer and sleep walking through endless imaging appointments. Surgery was at the end of June, a double mastectomy and I spent two drugged weeks on the lazy boy in the living room and seven months with a plastic tissue expander that had been shoved under my pec muscles during surgery. It's a special kind of torture to not be able to sleep on your side for seven months without pain. So a month after surgery, I began six months of chemo, specifically, the red devil, cytoxin, and then taxol. Of course all my hair, eyebrows and eyelashes fell out. The first set of chemos were the sick kind along with this awful stung feeling in the brain. The last three months was taxol, a tree bark, that makes your bones ache to the core.
That said, I believe I shouldered it well. After a month of no hair, I gave up the scarves and walked bald. I received a lot of kindness along the way. I am so blessed to have such wonderful people around me and a saint of a husband who never flinched in his care for me.
Please tell anyone with fibrocystic breasts to insist on a sonogram along with a mammogram. My mammogram came back A Okay and had my OBGyn doc not felt the lump, we never would have known. And the thing is, this is an epidemic, woman younger and younger are getting this cancer and the younger a person is, the lower the survival rates as it's most likely a fast growing, aggressive tumor.
So that's where I am. I had 'exchange surgery' on Tuesday where they took out the tissue expanders and put in the silicone implants. And we leave for Jamaica in thirteen days. So, I guess I can say, that things are looking up for 2012. If you have an extra prayer, please throw one out there for me that the cancer won't return. I'd appreciate it.
XXOO
Elizabeth
That said, I believe I shouldered it well. After a month of no hair, I gave up the scarves and walked bald. I received a lot of kindness along the way. I am so blessed to have such wonderful people around me and a saint of a husband who never flinched in his care for me.
Please tell anyone with fibrocystic breasts to insist on a sonogram along with a mammogram. My mammogram came back A Okay and had my OBGyn doc not felt the lump, we never would have known. And the thing is, this is an epidemic, woman younger and younger are getting this cancer and the younger a person is, the lower the survival rates as it's most likely a fast growing, aggressive tumor.
So that's where I am. I had 'exchange surgery' on Tuesday where they took out the tissue expanders and put in the silicone implants. And we leave for Jamaica in thirteen days. So, I guess I can say, that things are looking up for 2012. If you have an extra prayer, please throw one out there for me that the cancer won't return. I'd appreciate it.
XXOO
Elizabeth