I was recently diagnosed with breast cancer and have decided to blog about my journey. If you need to catch up on my story, please check out this page for the chronological list of posts.
There wasn’t a whole lot of action on the cancer front this week. Unfortunately. I don’t know what has happened, whether the tumor has grown/shifted or if it is just punishing me for the biopsies, but I have been fairly uncomfortable lately. I think it would be awesome if we could either get this tumor out of me or at least shrink it with chemo…soon! This coming week should bring some answers.
This past week I went in for an echocardiogram. Even after everything I have read on cancer recently (which is quite a bit), I surprisingly wasn’t aware that heart testing was a normal part of the cancer journey. If you weren’t aware either, I’ll give you the quick rundown of what the man in cardiology told me. Basically, the heart has a certain amount of strength in its “squeeze”, which is measured by something called the ejection fraction. Chemotherapy can sometimes weaken the heart’s squeeze (which can cause a host of problems), so my heart will be periodically examined by echocardiogram to monitor any changes to the ejection fraction. My echocardiogram from this past week will serve as the baseline to which my future exams will be compared.
The exam itself was super easy. The only thing that complicated mine was that he couldn’t get a great image for the ejection fraction so he had to use contrast via IV. Overall, I was in and out in about 30 minutes.
The only other thing that happened this week was confirmation that my surgeon is an awesome woman. She noticed that the plastic surgeon’s schedule changed because of our crazy winter weather. (The plastic surgeon comes to our cancer center once per month but the freeways were closed last week, so he rescheduled his one day for next week.) My surgeon, being the awesome proactive lady she is, had her office call me up to see if I wanted to have a consultation with the plastic surgeon while he was here. She acknowledged that I don’t have a treatment decision made yet, but she knew that if it will include reconstruction, I would need to have this consultation first. By meeting with the plastic surgeon next week, I am avoiding a possible one-month delay in waiting for my initial consultation prior to reconstruction. At this point I’m tired of waiting for things, so any decisions that will decrease potential wait time is considered a big win!
So this coming week will be a busy one and I hope that I will have some treatment decisions made in time for my next update!
Keep Reading – – > Weekly Update #3 (January 31, 2017) {More Tumor Details, Surgical and Chemo Game Plan}