annathepiper | BFFN 2: Revenge of BFFN

Some of y'all will have noted that on Tuesday, I had me Take 2 of the biopsy that was originally scheduled for the first. This afternoon, ever so conveniently timed to happen right during the first morale event we've had on my floor in months, I got the call with the results.

Long story short: DCIS, round 2.

I'd say I'm infuriated, aggravated, pissed off, and all of these things would be true, but honestly, I'm just tired. This makes it official: six years in a row of medical crap. I don't even have enough energy at this point to really work up more than a token level of pissed-offedness, despite the icon.

Spoke with two different doctors on my way out of the ship party, since they were willing to talk to me over the phone and I wanted answers now.

Here's what they had to say, as best as I understand it.

Question #1 that I had was "help me understand how this happened given that I just had eight weeks of radiation therapy".

Dr. Taylor didn't want to commit to a solid answer on that, but had two scenarios he was speculating about. One was, there was something in there that got missed since it was in front of the main excision area that Dr. Towbin did before, and that something somehow managed to survive getting zapped for eight weeks. The other, this is something new that has managed to take aggressive hold since the radiation. It's also possible that some combination of these two scenarios has happened. Either way, this is a rare and unfortunate occurrence. Not entirely unheard of--but apparently I get to be one of the few people that falls into the narrow band of probability here. Joy.

Question #2, "does this new thing have anything to do with the smaller problem area that was identified before but which at the time was deemed not a problem?"

The short answer to this is "not exactly". It's apparently very near to where the papilloma was identified before, although it is not the papilloma itself. What I'm hearing out of this though is that that general area was in a potential pre-problem state at the time and that it's just gone and decided to be a problem now. Glee.

Question #3: "what's the next step?"

Dr. Taylor was pretty much point blank firm about recommending a mastectomy at this point. He said that if it were a family member of his (and he's apparently had two family members go through breast cancer, so he's got some personal family experience to draw on here as well as professional), he'd be making that recommendation. The main issue of concern here being, if I've got something going on that's badassed enough to survive a generous lumpectomy and eight weeks of zappage, we can no longer fuck around. Not if we want to keep this from getting any more aggressive.

We also agreed that I should get a mammogram done of my left breast ASAP, just to verify that nothing has tried to get uppity over there. This will help nail down whether I'm going to be looking at a single or a double mastectomy here--though right now, to be perfectly honest, I'm feeling very inclined to just say 'fuck it' and have both of them off. I'm tired of this shit, and I don't want to go through rounds 3 and 4 of DCIS on the left and be all lopsided in the meantime and have to wear prosthetics.

But right now I'm too cranky to really make that decision, and will deal with it more rationally after the mammogram.

Tonight, there will be booze, 'cause really, if anything warrants getting plastered, this is it.