Holiday in...

Doctor's appointments over holidays are always challenging, because many patients have time off from work while many offices are doing their best to rotate their staff in order to ensure that everyone can have some sort of holiday. 

Waiting rooms are full.  Schedules slip.  Records and prescriptions aren't communicated as easily.  Thus, my "chemo teach" got bumped from 11 am to 3 pm, bumping a mammo/sono to 4 pm Friday.

The 3 pm (+45 min wait, but I was warned) had to be truncated, and so the port will be installed after my first treatment.  I was a bit surprised by the dexamethasone burst-and-taper over the next month.  I am sorely tempted to cut the pills in half. 

So, the mammogram/sono got moved to 4 on Friday, luckily, because there was a last minute cancellation.  Yes, there was a 45 minute wait, a snafu with the prescription for the tests, and a lack of records transfer. 

As we all knew (or at least I did, my last mammogram records weren't there), the visible dysplasia wasn't going to easily show up on a mammogram.  Was I surprised that more detailed photos of my left breast were ordered?  You betcha.  Same with the ultrasound:  we got better images of the problem area.  But we also got more thorough-than-expected images of my left breast, including one set gathered by the supervising doctor personally.

Note:  My dear ultrasound artist:  THANK YOU for putting a space heater in the room!!!  She explained that the room was kept cold, and the window wall was cold in winter (though it was an unseasonably warn 55 degrees). 

So there are two iffy spots in my left breast, ones that did not show up on the PET scan.  My surgeon will decide whether or not to biopsy them.  Hope is, whether they are benign or not, the neoadjuvant 
treatment will take care of it.  Still and all, I won't be too surprised by biopsies, and may even request them.  The swelling in one left lymph node detected by PET scan only (not me) may be explained by this stuff.

Whether or not they are malignant, they are a recurrence of the pre-cancer I had in my left breast, which is oddly NOT a spread of the cancer in my left breast, but INdependently co-arising.