hating that surgeon

the surgeon who did the procedure called me to see how everything was feeling....when i said that it felt sorer than she had led me to believe she really didn't want to hear about it. i did say that the med student or intern who inserted the iv really botched it up and she said, "i'll have to find out who that was".

so. my question is...doesn't she know who was in her or? for all i know a monkey could have done the operation. i was out on that michael jackson juice.
honestly, i think drs should have to experience all the procedures they do themselves. i could tell she had little or no interest in actually listening to what i had to say. feeling like it was amateur day at mt. sinai.

feeling less sore today and going for walk outside. want to enjoy as much of this good weather as i can while i can.

sporting a port

so i'm posting the photos of my arm 2 days after getting an iv so i could get a port in. i am so angry that the surgeon or anesthesiologist allowed an idiot intern to do this. when he missed the vein initally, he said, "oh this is so embaressing" as he continued to dig for a vein. ironically, i got this procedure to save my one arm from getting all the veins blown by the 18 weeks of infusions. the whole procedure was kind of bizarre from the get go. met w/ the surgeon on monday. she was lovely, very nice and said that it was kind of a big nothing - that i'd feel sore but not a lot of pain or a big deal. i'm starting to really not trust any of the doctors when they say that.

she'd had a xlation for tuesday morning and when she offered it, i figured, "why not"? otherwise i'd spend the week kind of waiting for the procedure. i should have waited. it kind of ruined all the healthy, great exercise i was doing. i didn't really anticipate that i would feel like a car had hit my left side (side where she put the port in) or that i'd go home, pop 2 percosets, grab an ice pack and pass out for 4 hours. kind of a precursor to how i might feel on a bad post cheom day. so now my left side hurts more that my right side - the side where i had the lumpectomy and the lymph node dissection. really sucks.

for me, too, i think the port made the whole process feel like it was real and it was imminent. i've been able to avoid feeling like that but there's no denying that all this shit is going down and soon.

i chose the name the shit storm when i dropped off my daughter, emma, one day at school. she was asking me about the treatments i'd be going through and i just said, "it's going to be a shit storm". we looked at each other and started laughing. but it is. going to be a shit storm.

since being diagnosed, everything i've learned and have been told continues to pile up and seem worse and worse. and i'm not even a worst case scenario.

my tumor was found on an annual mammogram. thinking it would be an uneventful one, i'd scheduled my mammogram sept. 4th, the friday before labor day. i was planning to meet my husband, howard, for a boozy lunch at locanda verde as a good way to start the holiday weekend. it wasn't until they'd pulled me in for the 8th time for another view that i realized that all was not going as planned. the technician said that the radiologist wanted to do an ultrasound and that she'd be in shortly to explain why.

the radiologist came in and apologized for making me wait so long but that she'd pulled all my films from 1998 and that she was seeing something that she'd never seen before and that she wanted to get a closer look at it. was i ok with that? are you ever ok with that?

she proceeded to locate the spot / tumor on the ultrasound and showed it to me. it was dark and dense. again, she gently told me this was a lump that oftentimes turned out to be nothing but that when it was dark like this that it sometimes was an indication that something was not right. she measured it and said that she'd like to schedule me for a core biopsy. because of my timing, she couldn't schedule it until wednesday of the following week.

if there's anything to be learned from this i would advise women to schedule their mammograms early in the week, so if there is a problem, they can get it looked at before the weekend. my timing sucked as i now had a 3 day weekend to get through, knowing that there was something that they were looking at. funny how sometimes you have a feeling that all is not right but you don't want to give into that fear. i kept telling myself that lots of women have to have biopsies and that for most, it's nothing. it didn't help matters for me that they'd been following micro-calcifications for the past 2 years and that this mass that they saw was right next to them. this year was (of course) the year that i'd actually gone a year between mammograms. up unitl then, they'd been watching it every 6 months.