Prosaic MRI-back update

My sister just told me she didn't want to read through "all the BGIishness" on my blog and to just give her the update, so this one will be really straight forward. That makes her sound unkind (or anti BGI), but she's not at all. She just is kind of "business" about these types of things.

So Lauren, here you are:

My MRI contained no revelatory information.

This is a good thing and thank you all for training your thoughts on there being no big surprises. The more sophisticated imagery did reveal the cancer sort of goes down deeper and therefore is bigger (though still not big enough to be picked up by mammogram) than the nubbin I felt, and the part which was ultrasounded and biopsied. This information seems to bear out why it would have had time to get to lymph nodes.

Now the story becomes about what they find out through the pathology after my surgery. Basically, my treatment regimen will be some combination of radiation, chemo, and hormonal therapy, but the amount and which type of each will be dependent on how many lymph nodes the cancer has gotten into.

The new hoped-for outcome would be it's only managed to stage an outpost in the one node we know of or one and two other little colonies, as that would mean I might be eligible for the "lite" version of the chemo regimen.

And, in the meantime, I have a decision to make about which Frankenboobie I want to have. Per my oncologist, the recurrence rates for lumpectomy and mastectomy are effectively the same. The differences would be in the fact that sometimes with mastectomy you would not have to have radiation (which especially for someone my age there are reasons to avoid). However, it won't be clear until after surgery if I can avoid it in any case, and by that time the die will be cast on surgery unless I choose to do a lumpectomy now with an option for mastectomy later.

I do not relish the thought of willfully setting myself up for further surgeries, but I need to sit with options for a couple weeks and see my plastic surgeon to actually look at the pictures of the different outcomes.

I received some sage wisdom from mom today. Though she's 22 years out, she can speak to how the choice she made (or was made for her) has played out. I'll also be reaching out to anyone else who has made this decision who may be willing to talk to me about their experience.

Either way, it appears I'll be thinking about something in the future I never gave much thought to (before living in Utah at least): necklines.

In the whole scheme of things, this feels quite tolerable.