Here We Go!

Tomorrow morning I am scheduled for surgery.  I will arrive at Marin General Hospital by 6:30am and am scheduled for surgery at 7:30am.  I should be out of surgery between 11:30 and 12:30.  I will spend one night in the hospital unless I need to stay longer.  I don't anticipate that, so I will be home on Friday!

I am having a mastectomy of the right breast and a sentinel node biopsy.  They will remove the breast tissue, while preserving the skin and nipple of the right side.  Once that is done, a tissue expander will be placed under the muscle to preserve the pocket for future reconstruction.  There will be two drains placed as well which will stay in somewhere from one to three weeks.  The sentinel node biopsy will have three to five lymph nodes removed and checked for cancer cells.  Today I was injected with some radioactive material that will travel to the nodes.  The way it works is that it will go to one node first and start to collect there, and then travel to the others.  The nodes that have the most material left (determined by a fancy geigercounter) will be the ones they remove.  I am completely confident that those will be negative.  The part I am most interested in is how much cancer is actually left.  We have a point of reference from the MRI that was done after my last chemo, but it should have continued to shrink after that point.

Tomorrow, I can say that I am cancer free.  This is a big deal.  Although I'm scared (surgery isn't exactly something you look forward to) I am ready.  I am ready to be truly on the road to recovery and not just in the process of getting worse before I get better.  I am ready to get my life back.  I am ready to be mommy, and wife, and friend, and not the broken person.

So keep me in your prayers and thoughts tomorrow.  It is a big day!