Yesterday was kind of a rough day. I ended up spending most of the day laying around and reading the boob book. I remembered at a gal came and talked to us at MOPs about a year ago about her breast cancer experience. I messaged H on Facebook and asked if she could connect her to me, and within the afternoon my phone was ringing. I ended up talking to M for over an hour and she very candidly answered all my questions. She even gave me the name of her oncologist in St. Louis. It's funny though, because I'd been searching on the Internet and I'd found Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish/WashUSM and that's where she'd gone too! Once I talked to her, I felt 100% better about my treatment options and I decided I was going to call this morning to get an appointment. I called first thing and pre-registered, now I just need to go gather my medical records and get them sent off.
The crazy thing is, what prompted me to maybe look beyond Springfield is that it doesn't look like any of our plastic surgeons do the reconstruction I may be interested in. How vain is that? Yeah, who cares if you get all the cancer, just give me fabulous boobs! However, after reading more of the boob book I realized something...I'm 36 years old. I'm pretty young to have breast cancer. Maybe I need to go somewhere where I'm not the only 36 year old patient! I'd like to have a surgeon working on me who's done more than a couple of mastectomies on someone young. Again, getting back to vanity, but dangit, I'm gonna have these boobs for another 40 or 50 years! Yeah, yeah, I know, DH will love me boobs or not...still though, if I was facing this 35 years from now I doubt I'd feel the same way. I dunno, maybe I would. I'm pretty vain sometimes...
In any case, it's not just the reconstruction I'm thinking about. I really want to do what's best. What's most likely to be curative, what has side effects I can live with, what's going to give me 40 or 50 (or more) years but neither kill me nor give me other malignancies or diseases in the process. There are no guarantees that I won't still be a statistic (but I'm already a statistic, getting pregnant on the Pill TWICE!) but there's a reason you can't Google "breast cancer treatment" and get a recipe for how to cure cancer. I suppose there are as many treatment options as there are women who have it.
I'm freaking tired today. I just could not turn my mind off last night and it was pushing 4 am the last time I looked at the clock. I didn't go to sleep, I just forced myself to roll over and quit looking at it! But I gotta get around and get those records gathered so I can get an appointment in St. Louis ASAP.
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