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Precursor to precursor: There's something really...fleshy...about thinking about breast cancer. I can't say I like it. It's different from thinking about colon and/or liver cancer. It is also very strange just generally to find oneself thinking overly much about another person's body in this fashion.
Precursor: Sister updates: in the past week, she had a pre-op MRI, and I hadn't realized this before, but I guess when they want to do a good job of visualizing your boobs, they have you lie facedown, which sounds distinctly uncomfortable. I should have realized they'd do weird things; about 20 years ago when our Uncle F was working as a nuclear medical technician, he went through a phase where he spent a ton of time thinking about breasts, because a doctor had gone and bought an expensive gamma ray camera that had the special feature of taking scans while the patient is sitting upright. Well, it turns out that breast tissue is dense enough to obscure the gamma emissions from the heart, and when a patient with breasts is sitting upright, gravity causes breast tissue to dangle in the wrong way. I don't actually even know if my uncle was able to come up with a workable boob slinger, but this should give you some interesting insights into a side of medicine.
Anyway, in R's MRI, they found a second suspect tissue mass in her other breast. It's smaller than the original one, so if nothing else she's now looking at another round of tissue biopsying and whatnot.
From what I understand, it might be more common than not to have all kinds of interesting "abnormalities" revealed when obtaining an MRI. I don't remember if it was my mother who first pointed this out, or where I learned it, but this seems to especially happen with backs. A person might be going through everyday life just fine, but then something happens and an MRI shows a slipped disk or two that actually have nothing to do with whatever is causing the actual troubles. So oftentimes, things aren't as simple as seeing what shows up on an MRI.
In any case, the MRI did not reveal any reasons to delay the surgery for tumor #1, so her boob-otomy on tumor number 1 was yesterday. That in turn meant that I was a little preoccupied throughout the day, thinking of her, wondering how things were going, knowing there wouldn't really be much news to share right now, grateful knowing that she would be spending a substantial part of the day totally zonked out.
But here's the horrible thought that won't quite go away: I kind of want to send R and L a box of cookies. As you may know, pink-frosted cookies are something of a specialty. I cannot tell you just how very tempted I am to send her circular pink-frosted cookies with googly eyes on them.
The real problem: the problem is that I CANNOT STAND the Breast Cancer Militia, and as such, I have a certain allergy to certain hues of pink and ways of responding to cancer.
So in practice, I won't actually send along such cookies. Sorry, sis. But I can't get the idea to die, so in an act of desperation I'm hoping that just blogging about it will get it to go away.
This kind of response is infinitely better: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cqf0WhSAruF/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
if not quite as edible.
In any case, it's going to take the medical people a day or three to wrap up their slicing and dicing of the tissue lump they've extracted. So we won't really have much real news for a little while longer.
And maybe this is how everything is going to go: a very slow-rolling drama that unfolds at an imperceptible pace, mostly just greatly inconveniencing everyone with nagging reminders of our mortality.
Also, I am supposed to be grading lab reports right now. Can you tell?
Precursor: Sister updates: in the past week, she had a pre-op MRI, and I hadn't realized this before, but I guess when they want to do a good job of visualizing your boobs, they have you lie facedown, which sounds distinctly uncomfortable. I should have realized they'd do weird things; about 20 years ago when our Uncle F was working as a nuclear medical technician, he went through a phase where he spent a ton of time thinking about breasts, because a doctor had gone and bought an expensive gamma ray camera that had the special feature of taking scans while the patient is sitting upright. Well, it turns out that breast tissue is dense enough to obscure the gamma emissions from the heart, and when a patient with breasts is sitting upright, gravity causes breast tissue to dangle in the wrong way. I don't actually even know if my uncle was able to come up with a workable boob slinger, but this should give you some interesting insights into a side of medicine.
Anyway, in R's MRI, they found a second suspect tissue mass in her other breast. It's smaller than the original one, so if nothing else she's now looking at another round of tissue biopsying and whatnot.
From what I understand, it might be more common than not to have all kinds of interesting "abnormalities" revealed when obtaining an MRI. I don't remember if it was my mother who first pointed this out, or where I learned it, but this seems to especially happen with backs. A person might be going through everyday life just fine, but then something happens and an MRI shows a slipped disk or two that actually have nothing to do with whatever is causing the actual troubles. So oftentimes, things aren't as simple as seeing what shows up on an MRI.
In any case, the MRI did not reveal any reasons to delay the surgery for tumor #1, so her boob-otomy on tumor number 1 was yesterday. That in turn meant that I was a little preoccupied throughout the day, thinking of her, wondering how things were going, knowing there wouldn't really be much news to share right now, grateful knowing that she would be spending a substantial part of the day totally zonked out.
But here's the horrible thought that won't quite go away: I kind of want to send R and L a box of cookies. As you may know, pink-frosted cookies are something of a specialty. I cannot tell you just how very tempted I am to send her circular pink-frosted cookies with googly eyes on them.
The real problem: the problem is that I CANNOT STAND the Breast Cancer Militia, and as such, I have a certain allergy to certain hues of pink and ways of responding to cancer.
So in practice, I won't actually send along such cookies. Sorry, sis. But I can't get the idea to die, so in an act of desperation I'm hoping that just blogging about it will get it to go away.
This kind of response is infinitely better: https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cqf0WhSAruF/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
if not quite as edible.
In any case, it's going to take the medical people a day or three to wrap up their slicing and dicing of the tissue lump they've extracted. So we won't really have much real news for a little while longer.
And maybe this is how everything is going to go: a very slow-rolling drama that unfolds at an imperceptible pace, mostly just greatly inconveniencing everyone with nagging reminders of our mortality.
Also, I am supposed to be grading lab reports right now. Can you tell?
