Back to the Surgeon

Now it’s a preop with Dr. Surgeon.

As a side note, I had asked my supervisor if she could schedule me off on Wednesdays in general because that seems to be a good day to see the various doctors. She said that she would have to give me Mondays because that works better for the schedule. I’d like to add that she hasn’t actually been to my office in several years, and I know what works better for that office than she does. Her unwillingness to give me the day I need really frosts my cookies, because it means that I take a day and a half off per week, and I need to make sure that I maintain at least 30 hours per week in order to be considered full time and maintain my health insurance. She has also told me in the past, when I’ve told her that she has scheduled me to clock-out before the office closes, that I knew what worked for the office and that she knows I’ll be working after closing. Her logic or lack of it astounds me. I’m working a check-out desk and training a new worker so that’s a whole lot of fun.

Anyway, it’s Wednesday and I’ve taken off early from work to go see Dr. Surgeon. See above.

He has to do an exam, and I have to change my top and put on that attractive paper top with the opening to the front. During the exam, he tells me that I will have to have a clip inserted. My head jerked up and I looked at his face and saw his staring out the window during his palpations, and I said “I’ve already got a clip”, and he said, “this is a different kind of clip.”

He proceeds to tell me that I have DCIS and it has to come out. Seems like an understatement.

He also said he would walk me through the procedure. It will be an outpatient surgery, but will be done at the hospital, not the outpatient center. I’ll be sedated, he’ll remove the DCIS, it will go to pathology, they’ll make sure we have clean margins, and then he will close. He said he wouldn’t close until he gets clean margins.

I mentioned to him that I had recently remembered that my first cousin’s Christmas card mentioned that she had had breast cancer TWICE but now she is cancer free. When I called her, she told me that she had DCIS, also on the left side, and that two lumpectomies were necessary to get clean margins. This made me doubt her doctors because mine has just told me that he wouldn’t close with clean margins of 2 millimeters, but more on that later. I told him that there is no history of breast cancer in my family.

Dr. Surgeon told me that 50-60 thousand women are diagnosed each year without a family history. Strangely, this doesn’t make me feel better. I would suppose that the testing has gotten so much more precise that things are being caught that wouldn’t have been previously.

Dr. Surgeon finished his spiel, and as he left the room, he slowed down with his hand on the doorknob, and looking back over his shoulder at me, he said, “We’ll hope and pray we get it all.”

I’m hearing conflicting messages.

Tags: DCIS