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Thursday, December 10, 2009

Things are moving along here, what a pain in the neck!

Here I lie, all bundled up in my bed tonight....my Mom tucked me in you know! It's been a long day and I've got almost an hour before I can take my next Tylenol 3 and go to bed so it's time to dash off a quick entry.

Tuesday I heard from the surgeon's office and he booked me for Thursday afternoon for minor surgery (haha, minor). I finally heard from the Tom Baker and they said that even though the surgery would be only 6 days before the PET scan that I should go ahead with it anyway (there is supposed to be 10 days between and surgery and the PET scan so the surgery doesn't interfere with the results of the PET). I guess they figure that we already know that something is wrong with my neck so really our concern is related to my lower back/sciatic "arthritis" pain and also to help with staging the disease. I had a good day on Tuesday! I felt like finally we were getting somewhere, leading us to a final diagnosis, and then to a treatment plan.

Wednesday I shopped my brains out as I have fears of not finishing everything I need to do before Christmas. I am happy to say that I'm mostly done my shopping now, but of course there remains a few last things to pick up. While at the mall my family doctor called with the results of my CT scan. Basically everything looks pretty much as expected, nothing in my lower body (yay!) and some multiple nodes (soft tumours) in my chest and neck. Additionally on Wednesday, my parents have allowed us to book a mini holiday to Banff for a night on the weekend of the 19th. I'm really happy to have the chance to spend some time with my husband who, by the end of my day, gets very little of the good in me these days.

This afternoon I had the surgical biopsy. It was booked at the minor surgery clinic at Foothills. When I got into the unit, the nurse took one look at me and asked "are you driving this afternoon", and I said, "no, I have my husband with me in the waiting room", and she said, "you look like you could use something to help relax you", to which I said "I think that would be nice!". I'm not sure the Ativan helped all that much, or perhaps it did and I really would have been a basket case in that operating room. I was nervous to begin with because ok, it's surgery, and my emotions are bit all over the place right now as well. But, I also knew that the node was in a tricky spot. The surgeon was very friendly and kind but still....local anaesthetic! So he froze my neck in a few places, made his first cut, had to freeze again, started to resect pieces, had to freeze again....it went on that way for a while until he could get at this little sucker which was way deep behind my muscle and everytime I would feel tense, it would slip further behind. So with some more resection, and some calming down on my part, he was finally able to get his biopsy, about 1cm of tissue. While closing, he told me that I was in the 5% most difficult to reach areas for this kind of biopsy and I told him that I was glad to challenge him. After getting stiched up and dressed, the surgeon came back to answer a few questions for us - no picking up kids for a few days, no lifting weights for 2 weeks, etcetera. I then asked him to see the CT scan and he actually went through it with us, it was extremely interesting to see how huge these nodes are compared to normal nodes. I also asked the surgeon, and showed him where, I have the little pains in my chest. He said that indeed, I was feeling the masses when I was working out. How crazy is it that I'm not going crazy!?

Ok that was a lengthier post than intended. Sigh. We won't know our results from this biopsy until mid-next week. I am supposed to hear tomorrow from the hematolgist's nurse about what our next steps are going to be. If I get some news, I will blog about it tomorrow.

Here's hoping that the T3 does the trick for me tonight.

1 comment:

  1. Great news about the C/T scan! That must bring a bit of relief.

    Hope the T3's helped last night. Glad you have mom there so you could get a lot of shopping done before this so you can take it easy for a few days.

    Enjoy your weekend away.

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