Which boob wrote this:

Ouch.

 

Hibiscus merengues from Damian restaurant here in LA. Obviously. What did you think they were?

This week's lessons are 
- cancer means more people touch you than you ever thought you would have touch you. 
- you'll have so many doctor appointments that even if you are good with names and love your providers, when asked, you will blank on their names.
- still more appointments

This week added three more appointments. 

Monday was a check up for my eyes after lasik last year; I still have residual dryness there and the doc warned me that if I do need to go on chemo, that might get worse so I should come back for stronger drops. (It's an hour each way, aka 10 miles in LA, so I might have to live with the dryness).

Tuesday was biopsy number two on Blob Loblaw. I had finally recovered from the first one which left me horrendously bruised and then it was time to go for the second. The mass was surrounded by vessels so unsurprisingly he hit one during the biopsy. This led to a pseudoaneurysm, which I did not know was a thing. Here, because the biopsy took away tissue, it creates space that the vessel now kind of blobs out into and can be a mess. He showed me on the ultrasound -- it's visible by turning on the color doppler which was pretty cool. Radiology remains a complete black box to me but that was fascinating. 

The treatment for that is to hold pressure until it clots. We're talking about small vessels here, so that generally suffices, though to pass the time while he held the ultrasound transducer forcefully on my boob, we talked about how you'd treat it if that didn't work (thrombin injection for my physiology nerds. He wasn't sure where the thrombin came from. It's conserved so I figured it could be scraped from animals but a little digging showed that while a bovine version exists, the injectable seems to be a recombinant version.). I didn't end up needing that though; it pretty much stopped, they placed a second titanium clip (now I am indeed bionic), and he left the tech to clean up what she said looked like a crime scene on my breast. On the up side, this time I wasn't lying in a pool of blood like I was last time when someone else did the biopsy. Also upside: she let me see the tissue they took (no, I didn't get a photo, my phone was locked away in a locker, sadly, but it wasn't very interesting, just blobby). Then she wrapped me up in a tight binding that I wear for 24-48 hr and sent me on my way. We expect results in about a week, but as a reminder: this one has <10% chance of being a problem, so we're not terribly worried about it. But since we're getting in there and doing things, we might as well do it.

Also, Tuesday, the city decided that they would pave our street, so we got flyers on flyers (fliers?) that we would not have access to our driveway. There would be no street parking in our whole neighborhood from 6 am to 6 pm. I drove around the neighborhood trying to figure out where parking would even be available and gave up realizing that the way I'd be coming home from the biopsy is not a state I want to wander around looking for parking and walking a half a mile uphill (we live at the top of a hill). So I sent a polite email to the address on the flyer saying hey...so about this...And to their credit, they did a fantastic job of accommodating me. I won't be able to get out of the driveway on Thursday now, but that's fine because...

Today (Wednesday) is the redo visit on the birth control swap out. I have to go get my hormonal birth control removed; last week they tried and failed and I'm hoping that the doc today can get 'er done. Then that gets replaced with a non-hormonal version. This is generally an extremely uncomfortable procedure that can put women out for a few days (the first time I had this done, I almost passed out). I am already pretty uncomfortable from the biopsy (and having pressure held against me for about 10 min to stop internal bleeding), and because of the bleeding, I can't take ibuprofen...so I 100% expect to sit around this afternoon and tomorrow in pajamas and not go anywhere. If you're wondering about work, it's fine, the team is used to us showing up to Zoom meetings in pajamas. That was happening pre-cancer. Pandemic perks.

So yeah. It continues to be a lot, but mostly this is just ranting. As I said, I'm uncomfortable, which is not the same as being in pain. I'm tired, but also I have chronic insomnia so that's really nothing new. I am annoyed with all the doctor appointments. But when I get frustrated, I also think about how glad I am to have them and be getting the treatment I am (and again how grateful I am for the tremendous support network I have).