Bear with me as these blogs may bounce around for a bit until I am "caught up". 

For the most part, I am able to stay positive and actually laugh at myself.  I take pride in my ability to see the best of a situation, and also find ways to just pound thru if need be.  I don't whine, complain, or find excuses.  I figure it out and get it done!  No matter what its been in my life.

Trying on wigs pre chemo with my niece.

                                                    

So I find it very difficult to face those moments where I realize that I have a deadly disease.  I am currently staged at 2b, so many may say that I am far from terminal!  And I would agree with that.  However, I was an easy 1a when this all started.  Should have been a bilateral mastectomy, wait the designated 3 months, and then get my permanent implants in.  Standard procedure.  Easy.  

Oh, if only!  During mastectomy surgery, they take out Sentinel lymph nodes to test for cancer as that is the way the cancer would leave the breast tissue.  As fate would have it, the 2 nodes of mine they took out came back cancerous.  Yes, there is a lot missing from this story between surgery and return of my pathology report, but we will leave that for its own tale.

So this new information of 2 dirty lymph nodes jumped me from the 1a stage to the 2b.  The lymph nodes have cancer.  I know have metastatic cancer, not just malignant.  This basically means that it has knowingly spread into other parts of my body.  So my first question is, where is it?  I asked for PET scan which would show any other tumors in my body.  The clincher is, my insurance will not pay for this test until after I have completed one type of treatment on my current diagnosis of breast cancer.  

I now sit in the chemo chair for 5 months.  Watching my hair fall out, watching my body get sick, hoping for the best but expecting the worse.  So I sit and wait, doing my best to stay positive and not think about where else the cancer is.  Doing my best to not be upset with insurance and making sit here for 5 months while the chemo does it job.  Hoping for the best, that the chemo does find and destroy all the other cancer.  

There are 2 big pending factors that could jump me to an automatic stage 4 and I have to wait for that information.  During my mastectomy only 2 nodes were tested, so we do not know if more lymph nodes contained cancer.  The other factor is if there is simply another tumor hanging out in my body waiting for insurance to pay for my PET scan.

The other simple truth here is that I have metastatic cancer.  I think the doctors just don't want to say what is really happening.  From the beginning, I feel they always tried to keep the best prognosis and not the possibility of what it might be.  Maybe this is just my situation.  To be fair, I had lymph node biopsies that came back clean prior to surgery.  But when you read the pathology report that has metastatic cancer in 2 nodes, that pretty much sums up the real situation.  

So yes, I have terrible moments where the reality of my situation hits hard.  And it is very scary, especially the not knowing part.  But then I gather my thoughts, regroup and figure out what I can do to make my day the best and brightest that it can be.