Surgery Tomorrow

David Poncelow — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 13:44:00 +0000

Well, my cancer surgery is tomorrow. It’s already been an interesting journey- a lot of waiting for answers and anticipation. It all started about four months ago- Dahlia found something unusual about my chest- an area directly underneath the nipple that had become firmer than normal and the nipple was somewhat flattened. Nothing tremendously noticeable, but unusual. I discounted it somewhat, but Dahlia was worried, so after a little while I made an appointment to find out what it was.

The first doctor I went to took a look and called it gynecomastia - a benign swelling of the breast tissue. This was enough to satisfy me so I let it go and didn’t worry about it for a few months. Again, Dahlia to the rescue: she noticed a change, something that looked like a scab on the bottom of my nipple. Time to go to a different doctor. I looked up clinics here in Ballard that people had spoken well of and decided to try the Market Street Clinic. I have to add my voice to the the praise I found - they were great. After an x-ray and some poking ad prodding they decided this chest-lump didn’t look quite right, so they referred me out to a specialist.

Here’s where the waiting begins. I visited with the specialist who agreed that the lump “didn’t look right”. While he hadn’t encountered any men my age with breast cancer (it’s pretty rare to begin with, and those men who do get it are overwhelmingly older) he decided that a mammogram was warranted. We waited a couple days, I went back in and found out that the results were ‘troubling’, so we needed to do a biopsy. Last Monday I went in for that procedure, which turned out to be rather unpleasant and painful. There’s a rather wide ‘needle’ that is propelled into the affected area by a spring under local anesthesia (which I’ve never had particularly good luck with). This ‘needle’ is actually a rather clever mechanism for taking something like a core sample. It’s built as something like a half-round spike covered by a metal sleeve, the end of which is very sharp. The device is injected and the sleeve pulled back, allowing flesh to settle into the space between the spike and the sleeve. The sleeve is then pushed forward, leaving a sliver of tissue in between the two parts. This sliver is then captured and the procedure repeated.

I’ve got an apprehension about needles (which I’m going to have to get over really quickly), so having this spike the size of a pen refill jammed repeatedly into my chest was a bit disturbing, particularly after the first one. So I took the day off, recovered my composure, and proceeded to wait two long days for the phone call I hoped would end this whole issue. Wednesday afternoon I got the call- bad news, it was indeed cancer. My doctor was out of the office until Friday, so I had a couple more days of nail-biting until Dahlia and I could get in to find out what was next. In the meantime I let work know- everyone there has been incredibly supportive, my manager, my director and my VP all coming by to offer whatever help they could provide.

Friday finally came and Dahlia and I were able to find out what’s in store. We found out that the cancer wasn’t constrained to the ducts- it was invasive. Not good. Also my lymph glands on that side are swollen, also not a good sign. I got a biopsy of one of the lymph nodes- much easier to bear as it was just a fine needle this time, no worse than a shot. If that biopsy came back positive, I was certainly going to lose all the lymph nodes in that area. If not, I was going to get a sentinel node biopsy during my surgery - a radioactive tracer is injected into the breast tissue a few hours before the operation. This then moves into the lymph nodes. In the same way a blue dye is injected just before the operation (the dye moves more quickly). During surgery the doctor will use these two things to find the first lymph node in the chain, removing that and sending it off to be analyzed for cancer. If cancer is found, I lose all the lymph nodes. If it’s not, I lose only that one. Yesterday I found out that the lymph node biopsy had come back inconclusive, so we are going to do this surgery-time biopsy. So it will be like Christmas- I’ll wake up to find out whether I have these bits or not.

The surgery itself is scheduled to be a modified radical mastectomy. This means that I’m going to lose all of the breast tissue on the right hand side, right down to the pectoral muscle (and including the fascia). The ‘modified radical’ refers to losing all of the lymph nodes- as I was just explaining, hopefully that won’t be needed. I’ll find out tomorrow! I have been so encouraged and supported by my friends in all of this- it’s almost overwhelming to find out how much I’m loved and how many friends I really have. I’m very lucky in that way. I’m very lucky in many ways, actually. I’ve got a wonderful girlfriend who has been tremendously supportive during all of this, a beautiful home in which to recover, a very caring place to work, and a fantastic circle of friends and family. I’d have to say that other than this niggling little cancer issue I am tremendously lucky. I’m just starting on this- chances are that I’m going to get chemotherapy which is liable to be unpleasant, but it’s going to be something that I’ll get through, particularly with the support network I have. My main goal right now is simply to get through it with grace, courage, and humor.

Z80 - The Diagnosis Is Not Consistent With The Gender of the Patient: Surgery Tomorrow

Surgery Tomorrow