I’m bumping your January 7 post because that was my mother’s birthday.
First of all, congrats on your achievement. I’m really happy for you.
My mother was a breast cancer survivor. I think I’ve told this story before. She discovered the lump in 2000, and luckily only had to have the lump removed and not the whole breast.
She drove herself to the hospital for the surgery. She checked herself out the next day AMA and had me drive her to a different hospital. Her only grandchild was being born via c-section, and she wasn’t going to miss it for anything.
Afterwards, she had someone take her to get her car, and she went home. She took the weekend off, and went back to work two days later.
She didn’t take chemo. She’d go to work every day, drive herself over to get her radiation treatment during her lunch hour, then go back to work. Conversely, if I go to the bank and the store in the same day, I need a nap.
She made it over 15 years with no recurrence, and died of a heart attack a few years ago.
She was the toughest woman I’ve ever met. And maybe the toughest person.
Got my mammogram on Monday, and the letter today informing me that it was, once again, normal.
Yee ha!
I noticed a small screen on the machine indicating the pressure, and asked the technician if she’d ever heard of this You Tube channel. She said she hadn’t.
The gauge was about 15 pounds for one breast, and 20 pounds for the other.
wonderful!! I am engaged in a discussion on FB wherein some women claim they no longer need the squish because they are over 65. I didn’t know cancer knew that, but I reminded them that after 40 years of perfectly fine mammos, I was Dx at 73.
I once saw a 100-year-old woman on the surgical schedule for a mastectomy. I could just imagine the conversation:
Doctor: “Now, you know this is a big operation…”
100-year-old woman: “Yes, and I don’t want cancer in my body! Take it out.”
Doctor: “Okay, I will.”
I also know a woman who was diagnosed with a rare type when she was about 60 years old, that she says is generally quite aggressive and likely to return but that was about 7 or 8 years ago and it hasn’t (she had a mastectomy with chemo and radiation) and several years later, her own mother was diagnosed with the same type at age 88, which was quite a surprise because that type isn’t considered genetic. Her mother chose to have a mastectomy with no further treatment, and died from an unrelated cause about a year later.
I had my annual mammogram on Wednesday, and figured everything was OK because I hadn’t heard anything. Today, I got the anticipated letter, and got another all clear! Woo hoo!
I had an appointment today, but I decided to reschedule yesterday because I was having a bit of the sniffles. I’m feeling better today, and that I got The Letter (which said they saw no evidence of cancer) sure helped. Woo hoo!
I had my rescheduled appointment today, and got another clean bill of health.
While I was there, I asked the ARNP, whom I saw today, if it was really true that oncologists tell newly diagnosed married women that their husbands will probably leave them, and preceded this by saying that I might be the 5th person who asked her that today. She got a weird look on her face and said that not only did she not do it, she had never even heard of anyone who did, and agreed with me that when couples separate, under these circumstances or any other, there’s almost always more to the story.
She said, “I’ll have to investigate that further” and I told her, “You won’t have to look very hard; it’s all over the place.”
