Surgery Update #1

Lisa went into surgery about 15 minutes ago.  Surreal.  I don’t have a better word to describe it. I’ve taken her to the hospital five times before—all for the occasion of delivering a baby, a part of a woman that most of are usually happy to physically detach from their bodies.  A breast—well, that’s a different story.

Lisa, Abby, and my sister Steffani a few hours before surgery. 

Steffani had two guests today:  Abby and our dog, Candi.

Though we are both in good spirits and feel very grateful for an early diagnosis, there is still an underlying tone of melancholy that accompanies this experience.  Melancholy is the right word, because it isn’t sadness.  We’re not grieving; we’re not feeling sorry for ourselves. We don’t have time for that, and we recognize that to be anything but grateful for competent medical attention and for a treatable condition would be inappropriate.  But I suspect that a feeling of loss—however bright or dim that it may be—is a natural companion to such an experience. 

Several times this week, as I went about my business--running errands, doing Christmas shopping, and engaging in all of the daily entanglements of a normal life—this thought would suddenly appear in my mind, and oddly, it appeared to be a foreign, unfamiliar revelation: your wife has cancer.  It just didn’t seem to fit.  Again, surreal. 

Let me describe what is happening right now.  Lisa is having a mastectomy of the right breast.  The cancerous cells in her breast—her DCIS—appear in two places of the breast.  One is about five centimeters and the other is about 1.5 centimeters.  It became clear that a lumpectomy—where they remove just the affected region and not the entire breast—was not option with the both growing size of the 5 centimeter region and the second region which was detected by an MRI. 

Prior to removing breast they will extract a lymph node near the armpit to confirm that the cancer has not begun to spread. Apparently, it is the lymph nodes that do most of the spreading of the cancer.  To leave the breast, the caner has to travel through the lymph nodes. Once in the lympathetic system, the cancer starts to propagate. 

Prior to surgery, they injected Lisa with a radioactive dye, which the surgeon uses in connection with a scanner to locate something called the sentinel lymph node.  If the cancer has left the breast, it will have travelled through and infected the node.  The surgeon removes one or two nodes that appear to be that sentinel lymph node. They send it immediately to a pathologist who tests it for cancer on the spot.  According to our surgeon, Dr. Tittensor, they can determine with 90% accuracy with that on-the-sport test that the node is cancer-free.

From the time that I started writing this entry, one of the surgeon’s nurses just left the operating room to tell me that they have extracted two nodes, both of which have come back negative.  Good sign!  I am going to sign off for now.  I’ll report back later and finish my explanation of what happens with the mastectomy, what the hopeful outcome of that is, and what lies ahead in the coming hours, days, and weeks.