She had her second surgery. The first one changed her forever. The doctors took her breast and the cancer that was growing inside it. They took some lymph nodes too. When the results came back from pathology the news was good. No signs of cancer in the nodes. The oncologist is still deciding on whether she’ll have chemo or radiation.
So she waits, no longer holding her breath, but still a little anxious.
She healed from that surgery and then it was time for a new breast. Reconstruction is a big word in breast cancer. That’s where they try to make a person “whole” again; that’s the way she put it. Many days of discomfort, drains, stitches and scars and she has a new breast. She says it’s hard to see herself in the mirror. It’s a constant reminder of what happened one late winter day when she went for a routine mammography and drove home numb after hearing about a lump and a biopsy and on and on and on.
She’s back at work now, determined to dive into her job and anything else that will distract her from thinking about how her life has changed these last few months.
“It’s the new me.”
New….in so many ways.
April 10, 2013 @ 6:21 pm
I hope your friend finds peace as she regains her strength and her new normal. Reconstruction… it seems so simple, like the 6 Million Dollar Man/Woman tv shows. They can rebuild us on the outside but we’re never really “rebuilt.”
I just passed 5 years since my diagnosis, and 4 years since I completed my last treatment. Going through all that I couldn’t think this far into the future, yet here I am. Still dealing with pain from the reconstruction and radiation scars, but I guess that will be with me forever. My youngest brother is awaiting a call from his doctor- either his elevated PSA is a false positive, or he has cancer. It seems to be taking an awful long time to get the results of the follow up (Laurie I think you wrote about that before. The saying “no news is good news” is true in most cases, but when you’re waiting on a possible cancer diagnosis, you want the results as soon as possible). Thanks for keeping this site going.