My sister has metastatic breast cancer. You’d think our family would have gotten used to the emotional ups and downs of waiting on tests, bone scans, PET scans and biopsies. But we haven’t. It’s the hope of one more day, week, or whatever we can have with this fabulous, caring person that keeps us going. That keeps us texting, posting, and calling each other with any little tidbit of information. Between her daughters, siblings, inlaws, outlaws and our parents sometimes passing on information is like the game of gossip. What starts out as reliable, medical explanations become messages of joy and hope or sometimes tears and despair.
She was first diagnosed in Sept. 2000 with a very aggressive cancer. Almost overnight the lump was there. She’s a nurse practitioner, so she had a mammogram done in her office after work one night. When she looked at the films she stared at her cancer in disbelief—a spot the size of a quarter in the left upper quadrant. Trust me when I tell you, nurses always know the best doctors. So she immediately called out to her colleagues to find a breast surgeon for the biopsy and surgery. After the biopsy confirmed the worst, her surgeon decided the lump was too big for surgery, so she found the “best” oncologist and started her chemo. Trading her hair for a smaller, operable lump was a no-brainer. Trading her normal breast for a chance at no recurrence was a decision few women could have made.
After the chemo, she had bilateral mastectomies using the trans flap method, followed by breast reconstruction. Every year she had scans, blood work and xrays to check for recurrence. We celebrated 5 years of cancer free. Every year, even last year, she was fine. A month after her annual bone scan, in Sept 08, she was having a pain in her sternum that wouldn’t go away. In October she called her oncologist who ordered a bone scan—it lit up like a string of pearls down her spine to a golf-ball sized tumor on her iliac crest. A PET scan confirmed the worst. And thus we were strapped into our seats on the worst ride of our lives.
To be continued…
