Today I was handed a sentence that I never could have imagined. This isn't baby related, but will certainly affect our family so I am choosing to share. Well at least I am writing this post today. I may not post it for awhile, so I may have to update it as more is revealed.
Today I was diagnosed with Breast Cancer.
The story-
I pumped for the last time on New Years Eve. At that point my supply had dropped to nearly non-existent, Bella was not nursing at all and strictly on bottles, and I was just carrying entirely too much guilt when I wasn't pumping. So I had to decide to be done. Despite my tiny milk supply, I knew there would be a little bit of "drying up" that I would have to go through. On my right side, there was a lump developing that felt surely like a clogged milk duct. I thought that I had softened it up a couple of times in the shower, releasing some milk. So when I could no longer express any milk any longer, and the lump continued to grow, I assumed it was a truly clogged milk duct (i.e. galactacele). I finally booked an appointment to see my new OB/GYN to have this addressed.
On February 9th I met with my new doctor who quickly agreed with my self diagnosis and ordered me a breast ultrasound which we expected would end in a fine needle aspiration. The following Monday (Valentines Day) I visited the Marin Breast Cancer Center where they performed a breast ultrasound. The ultrasound tech and Doctor concluded that it was clearly a cyst, and most likely a milk cyst (i.e. a galactacele as previously expected). The Doctor was going to have me wait an additional 6 weeks to see if it would reabsorb. I asked them to please not make me wait since it hurt and had already been there for about that amount of time. So they booked me for a cyst aspiration for the following week!
Fast forward to yesterday, I went back to the Breast Center for what I believed would be a cyst aspiration. The doctor set up with the ultrasound to navigate the needle in to drain what we all believed was milk. He got the needle in, and discovered our galactacele was in fact solid. So he changed course of action and moved to a core needle biopsy. They took four samples and informed me that "it was almost definitely a fibroadanoma". A fibroadanoma is a common benign tumor in young women and are dramatically affected by hormone changes. The way it was described to me, it sounded the opposite from what happened to me (most women develop them during pregnancy or other high hormone periods and then they shrink after breastfeeding etc). When I visited "Dr Google" last night, I managed to convince myself they were right.
Today, I was out to lunch when I received a phone call from my doctor. Her message was bright and cheery but she asked me to call her back. I was about to go home and figured I should wait until I was home and not driving. During my drive home, the office called again (they had called the house during this time too) and the nurse told me they wanted me to come in "today" and could I be there at 3:50 (about an hour from the call). I knew in my heart that this was not good news, despite not knowing my actual diagnosis yet.
So off to the doctor I went, with my mom, Isabella and Nick along with me. Nick and I went in to talk to the doctor. She explained that the biopsy came back abnormal and the cells were cancerous. All we know beyond that is that it is "ductal" and that it was caught early.
Tomorrow I will meet with the surgeon to discuss our options. I have additional diagnostics that need to be completed to confirm my diagnosis. We need to be sure it is only in the right breast and not the left, and that it hasn't grown anywhere else, like the lymph nodes.
So there you go. If my world hadn't already been insanely turned upside down, it is now. I went from a married lady, to a pregnant woman dealing with Gestational Diabetes, to a new mom struggling with breastfeeding, to a future breast cancer survivor all within about a year and a half. Let's hope this is the end of the hard stuff and we can just get life going happily. I love my baby and want nothing more than to focus on raising her to be the amazing woman I know she will be. To do that, I must beat this.
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