A day of docs

Yesterday was my regular check-up with my onco-crush, Dr D. 

He’s so young and so cute ya just want to squeeze him. And he’s a hugger, too, so squeezing him is definitely an option.  Me, I’m not much of a hugger, as my book club buddy Laura will tell ya. She manages to get more hugs out of me than anyone. I’m not very touchy-feely by nature, but I’m working on it.

I got a couple of hugs from Dr D yesterday, and since I won’t see him again until January, he said Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, too. That makes me panic a little, thinking the holiday madness is upon us and I don’t have enough time to engage in the consumerism that has become de rigueur. I also don’t tend to think that far ahead. I’m more of a small-picture kind of girl who’s learned not to look too far down the road, because there might be something wicked lurking, like a 15mm invasive ductal carcinoma and its nasty friends, DCIS and Paget’s Disease.

Dr D is very big-picture, though, and he’s not at all worried about something wicked lurking down the road. That’s one of the many reasons I like him — every time I see him, he tells me he doesn’t think my cancer is going to come back. That’s music to my ears and a balm for my worried soul. When I told him that I think about recurrence every single day, he tut-tutted and told me to think about something happy instead. Duly noted.

We had a long talk about my love affair with alcohol, as we do at every visit. He knows I’m a fan of the sauce and while he would like to see me cut back because of alcohol being a risk factor for breast cancer, he also advises his patients to live their lives, and he’s realistic about the studies being inconclusive about just how big of a factor alcohol is anyway. I pointed out the tragic and really-not-fair example of Linda McCartney, wife of the famed Beatle, who died from breast cancer even though she was a hard-core vegan, ate 100 percent organic, had no family history of the disease, and never drank. You can’t live much cleaner than that, and the bastard still got her. I’m not vegan, but I am hard-core vegetarian, I eat a lot of organic, I actually like fruits & veg, and had no family history of the bastard disease, so I’m going to enjoy raising a glass here and there. Not every day, like I would like, but that’s my choice. There’s nothing I like more than having a glass of wine while I cook dinner every night. I don’t do that anymore. But I’ll still say cheers to the freaky weekend. And if a certain someone shows up with an unexpected bottle of bubbly because it’s Tuesday, then I say life is for living and pop that cork.

Once we discussed and debated the effect of alcohol on BC patients, we (thankfully) moved on to other topics. He has a very nice bedside manner that involves him spending a good deal of time looking right in his patients’ eyes and asking how the feel. How they are coping. How they are emotionally. He knows that fighting the vicious beast that is cancer is way more than a physical battle, and he spends the time necessary to check on the non-physical battlefield. Smart man. In this process, however, he might have bitten off more than he wanted to chew by asking me if I’m happy with my reconstruction. Cue the $100,000 question.

Do I think my surgeons did a good job with my newly reconstructed chest? Yes. A fantastic job. Does it look 1,000 times better than it did pre-reconstruction? Way. But am I happy? Not so much.

See, we had a conversation very similar to the one last week. And I pointed out to Dr D, as I have to other docs, that I am one of the uncommon BC patients who was happy with her body before cancer ignited a stinking bag of dog-doo on my front porch. Sure there were some things that I wanted to tweak, after having babies, nursing babies, and turning 40, but overall I was happy before. That makes it kinda hard to then be happy with the after side of  multiple surgeries and their far-reaching side-effects. I predicted that long after my “journey” is complete and I go back to my pre-cancer life, I will always see the scars instead of the progress. Not to be a Negative Nellie, mind you, but because I am very realistic. I know that the 17-inch scar on my belly will fade. In fact, it already has, and it started out looking way better than a lot of what I’ve seen in doing my research. I know that the “flaps” of skin used to create my breasts will settle into the landscape of my battle-scarred chest. I suspect that some day I will be more “me” and less “it” when it comes to thinking about how cancer has changed my body. But I’m not there yet, and Dr D listened and counseled me.

He gave me a very good piece of advice. So good that Amy jumped up and wrote it down on a piece of paper towel in the exam room. He said, “Focus your attention on the things you have achieved, because you have achieved a lot, but you still have a ways to go.”

He’s right, of course.

I just don’t tend to think that way. I’m way too busy thinking in the here & now (do I have enough bread to pack the kids’ lunches? Did I move the clothes from the washer to the dryer? It’s Mary’s birthday tomorrow; where’s the card I bought for her 4 months ago?). I need to stop a sec and shift from the here & now and the never-ending “to do” list and think for a moment about how far I’ve come and what I’ve achieved. My “journey” has been far from ordinary, routine. As my nurse-friend Laura says, “Everything that could go wrong did, and you were as far from a textbook case as could be.” True dat.

Two really great things came out of my appointment with Dr D, besides the pep talk and his blessing to have a drink. The first is the end of the Lupron shots. Hooray! I endured a year of that blasted drug, and am thrilled to say adios to it. The needle was huge, the drug was of the ilk that burns like fire upon entering the body, and the side-effects were hideous: hot flashes often enough to power a small city. Sweating more than Leon Lett after his infamous fumble against the Dolphins. Mood swings that make people run and hide from me. Joint pain that sometimes catches my breath. Decreased bone density that I can’t feel but fret about anyway. Bye-bye nastiness. Of course the flip side to being done with Lupron injections for hormone suppression means that I have to get serious about the oophorectomy.  Gotta get those ovaries removed for good. As much as hate the idea of yet another surgery and yet another recovery, I am of the “slash & burn” mentality when it comes to cancer. Get ’em out so they can’t cause any trouble.

Item #2 in the “this is really great department” was the very last port flush. Hooray! I’ve had my port for almost 18 months, and it has served me well. It’s made my life easier and saved my already-floppy veins from being blown out once and for all. It’s allowed me to endure so many needle sticks that a 20-gauger no longer makes my palms sweat. But I won’t miss it. I will happily bid adieu to the titanium disk sewn into my  jugular. I will not miss the monthly flushes with saline and Heparin. I will keep it, though, as a souvenir. As a reminder of all that I’ve achieved. Of all that I’ve endured. Of all the crap that was flung at me but how little of it stuck.