Friday, September 7, 2007

Have the Fortune Cookies Lost Their Minds?

Current mood: blah
Category: Life

Currently on my IPOD: Your Love: Casting Crowns

Good Morning,

Yesterday afternoon, for lunch, a girlfriend and I ordered Chinese Food from a great little place down the street. I needed to have something in my stomach before going through with the biopsy. (More about that in a sec)

We got done with a satisfying meal and it was time to open the fortune cookies. I just can't possibly eat Chinese Food without a cookie at the end. Could you? Probably not, even if you don't want to admit to it.

I opened up a cookie and it said, Your day is about to get a lot worse.

WTF? Is there some disgruntled writer who hates his life because instead of writing that romantic woman's novel about a woman and her dream of becoming the bearded lady in a circus, is stuck writing fortunes in a sweat shop in east LA?

I went upstairs and showered and tried to talk myself into not believing in the power of suggestion. Despite the fortune cookie, by the time I had gotten out of the shower, I had convinced myself that the biopsy was going to be not so bad.

Well, as the cookie version of the Dali-Llama from hell said, my day was about to get a lot worse. First off, the radiologist had probably the worst comb over hair I had ever seen. My goodness, it was actually something that if I was a man, I would have nightmares about. But the only thing that matters is the fact that he should know what he was doing during the biopsy, right?

And this is where my day got a whole lot worse.

I asked him about being able to get the microcalcifications out with this type of biopsy. He said, "What microcalcifications?"

I said, what do you mean what about the microcalcs?

He said, he was only told to biopsy the mass. And he had read the ultrasound reports. I asked him if he had read the mammogram reports. He said no.

Uh..Isn't that your job? shouldn't you have looked at the whole picture before diving into one of my tits with a needle the size of a small child?

He said according to the ultrasound he was convinced that this isn't cancer, but something else, something that he didn't really know how to describe and wouldn't be able to until the pathology reports came back. He then went to look at the mammogram and he said, oh...that's a whole different picture.

No shit, sherlock.

That's what I wanted to say.

The biopsy was a little less than comfortable. And what he did say, is despite the pliable nature of breasts, the tissue inside is actually quite tough. He made a small 2cm incision into the 7o'clock position of the breast and inserted the needle. THANK GOD I WAS NUMB. The needle was enormous and you could watch it go into the breast on the screen above me. Pretty cool.

He had a rough time getting the needle into the breast mass but once he did he hit this button that made a very loud "click" and you could see the needle shoot through the mass as if it was a harpoon. He repeated this about five times. The tissue samples that I saw afterwards looked like fish poop.

Yep, you guys think that breasts are so enticing and sexy..nope, on the inside they look like fish poop.

He said that he hoped that this was fat necrosis and would possibly have an answer for me today. He said he would call me on my cell phone. But if it didn't come back today then I would have to wait until next week when I follow up with the surgeon. Which will be on Thursday. I hope to hell he has an answer for me today. I am already sore and sick about yesterday, why not give me a call today and either put this issue in its place or start me on the treatments I need sooner rather than later.

And then he made my day even more worse than it already was. He said that the bad news was that the tissue samples all sunk to the bottom of the solution. Everyone knows that fat floats. If it was all fat, such as the fat necrosis, which is my other possible diagnosis for this mass, it would have floated along the top of the solution. But all five samples sunk to the bottom. He said that this means that there is some other tissue with the samples which is good and he thinks that they got a good sampling of the mass. But, he was kind of hoping that it would be floating.

I will update you all as I know something. I think if he calls me and tell me that I have cancer I am going to tell him to see a stylist about that comb over. Bitter? Me?

Oh well, all I have to show for what I went through yesterday is a band-aid and a bruise.

Yours in Boobies, Bruises and Bone-Head Fortune Cookie Writers,

Cicily

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cicily, I personally want to 100 percent endorse your desire to have the "comb over talk."

Men have got to get a clue about the impact of this disease. Aren't we all just being codependent when we don't talk about it. :-)

And the WTF for me is that still, after all this time, we come to doctors in the middle of a personal health crisis AND have to tell them how to do their jobs. Comb overs are just icing on the cake of cluelessness.

Good job listening "through and for" your body.


L

Travis Erwin said...

There is a truck driver here at the post office that has a unique combover. Instead of parting it an inch above an ear he parts his hair about an inch from the top of his neck and brings it straight forward.