BC Becky

Never thought I'd want to be a breast cancer survivor

Tag: memories

  • Emotional memory

    Emotional memory

    I’m finding it a little weird that lately I’ve been having memories – almost flashbacks but not as vivid – of the time around my diagnosis. We aren’t at an anniversary of it … that is still 5 months away. It is why I’m finding it all rather strange. And the memories aren’t terribly vivid from a visual perspective, but they are much more from an emotional perspective – except that I feel like I’m looking in on myself.

    I also have a sense that the last few years didn’t happen. This is a sense that happens rather frequently. Maybe it is a part of moving on with my life, and the stepping back into some things? Even as I write this I’m remembering the sense of denial I had … and I’m glad that I don’t remember the feelings of intense sadness … not that I don’t remember that they happened, more that I don’t remember exactly how they felt. I don’t have the emotional memory of those feelings, where I’m having the emotional memory of specific times.

    Now, my research does involve me going back over my blog posts – but for the most part I haven’t done that yet – and really it doesn’t seem to at all be related to that.

    When it first started happening I dismissed it. Now I’m finding that I’m noticing it happening – a perhaps a little more frequently then I’d like.

    Feature image by Joe Shlabotnik via Flickr CC By 2.0.

  • Memories of clear nodes

    Memories of clear nodes

    It was two years ago today that I got the very good news that the initial pathology returned that my lymph nodes showed no signs of cancer. It was a few days later when the final pathology report came in that it was confirmed that my lymph nodes did not show any signs of having had cancer – so no dead cancer cells. Since I did chemotherapy first, if the cancer had spread to my nodes, the chemo may have cleared it out. We will never know 100% for certain what the pre-chemotherapy results might have been. It doesn’t really matter.

    Scott told me that I asked him over-and-over again about the status of my nodes as I woke up from anesthesia. It was the biggest unknown in my treatment. I had known that I had tumors. Scanning gave us a pretty good sense of how big they were. Although scans didn’t show us any signs of lymph node involvement, I wouldn’t know for certain until they removed the sentinel nodes (the first couple/few) and tested them for cancer.

    The sentenal node dissection was only a small part of the surgery that I underwent on November 19, 2014. I also had three lumpectomies (which were not really that successful – in that one didn’t have clean margins and one missed the tumor altogether). I knew that my surgeons were not really concerned about the success of the lumpectomies. They knew that they would be going back a month later to do a full bilateral mastectomy. The primary reason for this surgery was a devascularization of the nipple and areola. This was the first stage in the nipple sparing mastectomy. In addition to doing a biopsy of the lump nodes, they also took tissue for a biopsy of the skin under my nipples. If that showed to have cancer, then they would remove the nipples during the mastectomy. Fortunately, the nipple biospies were also negative for cancer.

    This was the first of three surgeries.

    It is hard to believe that was two years ago.

    Feature image CC-Share Alike 4.0 by Cancer Research UK / Wikimedia Commons

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