Hoping

UPDATE:  Oh, huzzah!  They just called and said the growth was fibrocystic and benign, so I'm all clear for now.  Whew, I will have a much, much better weekend knowing that.  What a blessing.
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A couple of regular readers have sent worried e-mails the last few days, because I've been a little distant and removed from the blog. Which, for me, is generally a sign that things are off in my world.

Rather than worry everyone needlessly, I'll fill you in: they found two lumps in my right breast during my mammogram this year. I'd been feeling off for a couple of months and I moved my doc appointment up so that we could schedule an earlier mammogram.

Turns out it was good that we did just that. Lesson here: listen to that intuitive voice in your head about your own health when you hear it.


On Tuesday this week, I had a biopsy done on the lumps.  One of them -- the deeper of the two -- turned out to just be a fluid-filled cyst, which is far less likely to be a concern.  Yay!

The other was more worrisome.  It was an irregular looking growth that had invaded the wall of one of my milk ducts -- you could clearly see it on the ultrasound, but it was impossible to tell if it had begun inside the duct and grown out beyond its walls or if it was tissue from outside that had invaded the wall and grown inward.  Ultrasound is amazing technology, but in this case I was impatient for instant answers that were just not there.

Several tissue samples were taken and I'm awaiting biopsy lab results at the moment.  Can I just say how much the waiting on this really, really sucks? 

As of now, that's what we know.  It could be entirely benign and that would be wonderful.  I've already had a bout with this, so I am familiar with the "worry, worry, worry...oh, thank God" moment of getting a benign diagnosis.   When The Peanut was only 3 months old, I had a golf-ball-sized lump removed on the left side that turned out to be a benign lobular dysplasia in situ, which is a fancy way of saying that I had irregular milk duct cells growing in a weirdly misshapen very aggressive yet mercifully not cancerous (yet) form, and that I've had to be vigilant about getting mammograms ever since because my chances of having breast cancer are elevated.

My family history is not great on this:  my mother is a breast cancer survivor (7 years and counting!), and we have lost a couple of second cousins to the disease.  So vigilance is key for me.

Waiting for results is really tough.  I catch myself jumping every time the phone rings, simultaneously dreading and praying that it is the nurse on my caller ID as I frantically scrabble for the phone.  And I've done what I always do when I'm worried about something -- I'm researching the hell out of it, to the point of having picked up a couple of cookbooks on cancer prevention and dietary changes that I'm trying to devour at a time when my mind refuses to really focus.

If, in the end of all of this, it turns out this is benign, I'm going to laugh at myself for being so panicked this time.  (This is NOT my first lump rodeo, believe me.  And thus far, they've all been benign.)  For some reason, though, this time feels different, in my gut, it just feels...different, is the only way to explain it.

But I'm refusing to be anything but hopeful at the moment.  Because, honestly, what else can you do?

All this to say, schedule your mammogram.  Do your self exams.  Pay attention to what your body is telling you on any given day.  Do yourself the favor of taking good care of what you have, because you just never know when it might just save your life.  And hold on to hope, because it is so much better to look at the world through a hopeful lens -- the alternative is just too grim to even consider, isn't it?

I debated whether to say anything or not, because it is still early days and I have no results as yet, just an odd, gut feeling that will almost certainly prove to be utterly and completely off base if I'm really, really, really lucky.  But then I thought about how useful a cautionary tale could be in getting someone who might need it to their mammogram this year...and it seemed like the right thing to do to say all of this out loud.  I hope I'm right.