Pathology came back today, and the bottom line is that all of the news was as good as I actually expected. I’ll get a full written report in a few days and will share interesting updates if there are any, but here are the highlights for now:

• Right breast totally clear and healthy
• Two lymph nodes removed from next to Lefty, totally clear and healthy
• The three masses in lefty were that, distinct masses
• The largest is under 2 cm

So what does this mean?

• Size of mass & clear nodes means that my cancer is stage 1
• This also means that I don’t need radiation
  • That would have meant 6 more weeks of treatment and it would have limited my reconstruction options… meaning that I wouldn’t be able to get the perky silicon boobs that I had my eye on
• HOWEVER, I am still going to need to do hormone suppression (something like tamoxifen) for 5 years- this is the part where I go into menopause and then maybe come back out of it… if I don’t find out that I’m a big enough risk for ovarian cancer that I should just get a hysterectomy. That will be a conversation after the genetic testing comes back.
• And finally,  I’m likely going to still have chemo so that they can ninja any little cells that are hiding, since I have 50 years of future survival to plan for, in which I’d prefer to be cancer-free. 🙂

The other kind of interesting bit is that she apologized about it taking so long to get back to us… but evidently they couldn’t find the two smaller lumps in Lefty once she was in the lab, so my doc had to tell them to go back and look again (so that we could figure out if we had one lump or three) and she actually referred to them as being like finding a needle in a haystack.

Or a 1 cm and a less than 1 cm lump in 2.1 kg of breast tissue. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but both of them together are right around 8.5 lbs. I have officially lost more than a Fenway and a half (Fenway is my cockapoo, and I’ve decided to measure my weighloss in his ideal weight 16 lbs)… and my boobs alone were more than half a Fenway.  How about THOSE puppies!

I’m still healing at least as well as my doctor expects, and getting a little bit better every day.  Hoping to be back and working from home part-time next week, but I’ve promised not to over-do, since as you can likely tell from this week’s posts, I still get stupid sometimes.

But today, I’m stupid happy!