Hello to you friends and family members alike. Best wishes to you on this New YEAR 2023. As I believe you know, I was diagnosed with breast cancer early in December. This booblog is written in an effort to be in open communication, without secretiveness, to inform and to lower the dramatic burst of my own temperament. If you wish to remove yourself, please either just let me know and I will delete your email, or you can just delete yourself as well.
This is neither my travel bloggery or my writing blog, and therefore is going to a smaller/different set of folks. My website is at Judithlavezzi.com, and this is NOT being posted on that site. Some folks have been kind enough to ask how all this works, so I will try to walk through this process with those folks in mind, explaining as I experience this new wrinkle.
The ‘C’ itself — I believe it is early, and small, and it is growing slowly (one of the perks of getting old, I am told) due to lessened hormonal riffraff dashing around.
Spending restless sleep, and forgoing good dietary habits, we’ve counted our time till this week of the first appointments. I am not going to bore you with the convoluted trail that this sort of thing becomes, connecting all of the forces that are coddling me through the thicket that is our tangled systems of medical care/Medicare/Insurance/ Medical technology – and we are getting the best available care in the larger cities. Holy Moly!
Not to be outdone, Lew is having some MRI attention for prostate. We both anticipate good results, by the way.
I am told that to get a “plan of care” all doctors and interested parties are involved at the same time, and that our first appointment will be a focused group in which all questions will be answered, and all mysteries revealed, by a group of interested parties (January 04), following an MRI on 03. Then the usual procedure is to wait within four weeks until the actual pre-surgery appointment (oh sure, no prob— that’s a piece of cake!) depending on the results of the ‘prognostic panel’, which is made up of three statistical reports from blood work — (Estrogen receptors negative or positive, Progesterone receptors negative or positive, and something calls a HER2 panel which was begun on the 11th of the month, but isn’t back yet.) — They are calling this the three-legged stool. After all that, a surgery of some sort.
The reports determine the extent of the surgery and the medications chosen and are the bailiwick of the oncologist with whom I have finally been given an appointment (January 11). The oncologists, confusingly, need the surgery to determine their part, but those oncology docs must be on the schedule before surgery, although they don’t have actual data until following the surgery. At the core of this is the primary care person who had to do the initial test and referral ordering – no one else can do that part.
She, the specific oncologist, will be the provider of (pick one or two) chemo, radiation, hormone blockers, etc, all-natural and friendly. There are choices about how one gets their radiation delivered, all of which sound exhausting, but that choice is dependent on the results they get from the surgery. Somewhere in there is yet another doctor, a radiation oncologist, who actually administers the medication, but not the radiation.
I am told to continue my normal life, and after what I think will be a lumpectomy. For 5 weeks there is to be no lifting weight of more than 5 lbs, and to ‘take it easy.’
You several who have had this same procedure tell me that ordinary life will go on as before. I have some travel plans and I’m happy to hear that, with two trips in February to Texas, one in March to Oklahoma, and maybe Seattle in April to see precious grands and their parents.
All this for a lump the size of a peanut – who knew? After I know something specific, I will probably be telling you more of what you didn’t want to know in the first place. Just throw this away if it is oversharing and you hate it.
Lew and I are blessed as well. We want to acknowledge the amazing folks who do so much to light our lives with love and joy. Also prayers, good wishes, love and comfort. Thank you for traveling along with us.
Judy and Lew.