LEADING UP TO SURGERY

November - December 2012.
The first week of November was pre-op week. Mamograms, ultrasounds, scans and what-not. Various needles involved, of course.  All leading up to the meeting on Friday with the surgeon who would pass sentence. I had a cold that week, now there's a surprise! It only lasted a day, mind, (sleep and rest and biomagnetism did the trick), while my partner's cold lasted two weeks.
The mamogram was a lot more bearable than any I had had previously, just freezing cold. The ultrasound doctor gave me scare when he said the tumour was ONLY one centimetre.  I protested and said what the oncologist had told me and what I had observed: they had inserted the titanium clip to mark the centre of the lump (which at that time, late September early October, they could barely pick up on the ultrasound it was so small) and since then tissue had been forming around the clip, the way our body deals with a splinter or any foreign body, (apparently this is very typical with these clips). The doctor agreed in his jolly way but also said it could be the tumour growing again.  He patted me on my naked back, exacerbating the goose bumps, and told me not to worry as he disappeared out the door. Really not the most sensitive doctor I'd met in the hospital to date. I had a mild panic for half an hour and then I realised this was a waste of time because I KNEW it wasn't the tumour growing, the way pregnant women know what's going on because it's happening inside YOUR BODY and if you listen and observe there's so much information coming your way. Interesting thing, when I had the tumour it was like a part of me, it didn't hurt in the slightest and I couldn't feel it from the inside.  I only felt it as a lump when examining my breast from the outside.  When they introduced the titanium clip I suddenly felt something foreign was inside me, it felt uncomfortable and in the days and weeks that followed there were repercussions in my back, other parts of my breast, my armpit and arm.
The MIR scan was as awful as I remembered, there's no getting away from it. Then at the end of the week the surgeon hit me with the following: out with all the lymph nodes and a huge chunk of my tiny breast. Wasn't expecting that one.  I'd been told my results were fabulous by the private oncologists, that few people made such progress in such a short space of time and here was the surgeon insinuating I was lucky it wasn't a mastectomy. He hadn't even received the results of the scan, which I had endured the day before (he finally got them right at the end of the consultation). Had he studied the other results or merely glanced at them? His decision was based on what I had been diagnosed with at the beginning of this whole malarkey and the fact that the oncologist had sent me to him meant it was operable so he didn't need to know more. For a second or two I felt as if the last 3 months and my spectacular progress meant nothing.
Well, I told the surgeon I'd think about it, which kind of flummoxed him, so I reckon he's just not used to people saying no. I got really scared and down that day and the next, and was feeling very sorry for myself, but by Sunday I had snapped out of it (thanks to my friend Montse's session too).  By Monday I felt good again and resolved that I wasn't going to have the surgery.  Been down this road before, though, said the same about chemotherapy and look what happened there.