Tuesday, May 26, 2015

More Health Challenges

Well, I haven't posted in a long time because I have been super busy- not just with my healing activities.
Billy, his mother, and I spent 5 days in NYC in early May on a "Broadway Binge". We saw 5 plays in 4 days! They all had merit but Carole King's Beautiful was our favorite. We knew all of the songs of course, the actress portraying Carole had an awesome voice, and I learned a lot about her rise to fame that I never knew.
Right before our trip I went to Atlanta and had a thermographic scan of my breast as well as as something called "Sure Touch". I already explained thermography in an earlier post so I won't repeat that. Sure Touch is an extremely sensitive tactile examination. A rectangular disk is passed over the breast tissue with some lotion to help it stay in contact with the skin. It detects levels of hardness. Obviously tumors are harder than normal breast tissue. It detected something at the tumor sight and also flagged some ares to watch on successive examinations. It can supposedly detect masses that are millimeters in size as opposed to mammogram which can only detect something that is centimeters in size... hence that is why they only found my tumor after it was a centimeter and a half, even though I had mammograms every 6-12 months for many years prior.
I hope to use that to monitor future changes in my breasts.
So I was supposed to have a lumpectomy tomorrow. I let Dr. B talk me into it the last time I saw him. He believes this will turn out to be ductal carcinoma in situ (explained earlier) or perhaps just atypical hyperplasia which I had on a biopsy a few years ago. That would be not malignant. He is so sure this is relatively harmless that he isn't taking a lymph node at the surgery. He volunteered that concession without me asking. For those of you who don't know, lymphadenectomy carries its own risk of complications.
So I had resigned myself to having the surgery and then I got sick over the weekend. Seems like a cold- haven't had one of those in a long time. My surgery has been postponed for a week and will now happen on June 3rd.
I started the process  of having my amalgam fillings removed last week. One down 3 more to go. Also looks like I may need to have a crown replaced for mercury and for decay.
To top off the month of May, I found out last week that the annoying pain in my knee for the last 2-3 months is due to a tear in the meniscus! Guess what that means. Yep, arthroscopic surgery on my knee one week after my breast surgery. I would ask, "What else could possibly happen now?", but I don't want to tempt those gods. I am trying to look at this like a big maintenance on a car- like having the timing belt and water pump changed every 100,000 miles on the many Hondas I have owned.
Will try to update more regularly. June looks like it is going to be a month of rest and recuperation.