The countdown begins...

2 days until my surgery, wow.

The past three weeks have been chemo-free in order to build myself up for the surgery. I’ve been feeling great so I took advantage of my free time by eating a lot and seeing friends and family. I was weighed on Friday, I gained 9 pounds! Funny to hear a female getting excited about putting on weight. It is so nice to be able to eat without throwing up, I must say. Also, I will never understand bulimic people.

Had a bunch of testing done this week in prep for my surgery. Blood work, physical, EKG, xray, MRI. All came back good. We met with my surgeon on Friday to review my MRI and Xray, and to talk in detail about my surgery. Lots of good news and some news that did upset me.

Fortunately my Xray looked great and my bone has healed perfectly straight – finally! It’s amazing how slow your body heals while you’re on chemo. I broke my arm in the end of June, it just now has healed. He also reviewed my MRI and mentioned how great that is looking as well. When I first met with him and we reviewed my first set of MRI’s, my tumor was the size of a lemon. Literally. “Now,” he says…”it’s practically disappeared.” This relieves me beyond words. By the tone of his voice he almost sounded amazed, like normally people do not respond this well to the chemo, especially for a tumor of such size.

The details of the surgery are pretty gory. So I won’t get too descript but basically they are removing the majority of the muscle in my upper arm, shoulder, and even some from my shoulder blade. They have to remove more muscle now than they originally had told me because of the break in my arm. When I broke my arm some of the blood from near the tumor seeped into the surrounding muscle. To ensure that they remove all of the cancer cells that leaked, they have to make an extremely wide incision. Because of this, I will have much less usage of my arm than originally thought. But I will still be able to write with my right hand, eat, touch my eyes, ears, etc. It will be hard for me to touch the top of my head without leaning down a little though. All of the bone in my arm and shoulder will be removed as well. The long bone in my upper arm will be replaced by a cadaver bone, and my shoulder and shoulder socket will be replaced by some form of metal/steel. They’ll also be using a metal plate to connect the cadaver bone to my own lower arm bone.

To my co-workers: when I return to work and we travel, you may not want to stand by me when we walk through the metal detectors.

We meet with the plastic surgeon the day before surgery to talk about what he’ll be doing. He’s the one that will be removing a large muscle from my back, in order to sculpt my arm back into shape. The one part that did upset me that I did not hear about before, is that my arm will be pretty disfigured. I could care less about the size and appearance of the scar, you can easily cover that up. But my shoulder will not extend as far out as it normally should, only about halfway out –if that makes sense. It will be very close to my body. And it will also appear slouched.

Two days before I found out about this my dad and I were in the parking garage and I noticed a kid and his mother, waiting for their car as well. I recognized him from the hospital and although I wasn’t staring obnoxiously, I did notice something “off” about his appearance. Then I realized that his shoulder looked exactly like what I described, and I said to myself “oh crap, I bet he had the surgery that I am going to have.” Surely enough, two days later I found out that I was right.

I know this is minimal compared to the other worries that I have right now, but you try to catch a break where you can. Especially because this wasn’t mentioned to me until less than a week before my surgery. You need some time to process and accept these types of things. If any of you ladies have any old business suits from the 80’s, feel free to donate your thick shoulder pads to me! ;]

The surgeon discussed the chances of the cancer returning. Normally it is a 7% chance that the cancer could return. But because I broke my arm, mine are a little higher. However he said that he is still positive about the situation as a whole because of how well the chemo has performed, and also because of my age. God forbid the cancer returns, and returns in my arm – there is no choice but amputation.

I don’t really have anything witty or light to say right now. I am still brave and positive about everything, but the 12 hour surgery that will be happening on Wednesday has me pretty shaken, I can’t lie.

Please think positive thoughts for me! I will be out of commission for a very long time after my surgery. So I will be giving a friend of mine my UN & PW to this page so that she can update it and let you know how everything went.

Goodbye tumor! Here we go….