Still down

I'm back from my very long imaging and surgical consult. I spent more than 3 hours having repeated mammograms squishing my sore breast repeatedly making me late to the surgeon by more than an hour. I am full of microcalcifications including my old suspicious spot. They want to remove them all. It sounds like they will remove almost as much flesh as before and this time, they will put in two wires. As they don't have a nice juicy tumor just below the skin to impale, it will be harder. So I was pretty much in tears with the surgeon. She said that I looked anxious. Not anxious just full of despair. I said the odds calculator said I had a 63% chance with chemo, 58% without it. She thought that sounded low so plugged in all the numbers in her 'physician only' model and came up with 66% and 76% with 3% in both cases being death from other causes.She spent a long time with me. Very sweet but it is still hard to shake this intense feeling of doom. The regime used for people in my case is this 4 cycles of adriamycin+cytoxan followed by 4 cycles of some taxol derivative. 6 months. I think that this is what Kathy of Chicago went through (life is Sunny blog). I also said that it sounded like it will be hard to get everything, maybe just cut the whole thing off. She said it would not improve my odds though I would skip radiation. I told her that I don't want to be stuck in this cycle of cutting stuff out, find there is more stuff there, then scheduling another surgery-meanwhile delaying chemo. Also these surgeries are hard on me. So the compromise we came up with was that this would be my last surgery for a while. After I am finished with chemo, they would check to see what was left and then attack. As for my tumor, it wasn't especially bloody-a good sign-as capillary density is proportional to this growth factor VEGF responsible for growing blood vessels to the tumor. Tumors that have alot of this factor are able to grow quickly and spread. However, the tumor had invaded my lymphatic system though it didn't make its way to the nodes yet.

As for Steve:We are speaking. We were supposed to have this meeting with a financial planner tomorrow and I told him to cancel it or just do it by himself. He said it was my money too but I said I just don't want to be figuring out how to get the highest returns possible when all I can think about is whether it is worth it to go through chemo making me an invalid for 6 months just to get just a small increase in survival. And I can't do it alone as I seem to be now. Maybe I should just take my chances and forgo the chemo.

He went to Naomi's teachers. No big surprises. She is just grossly immature and difficult. Since I was there so long, I didn't need to wait long after the conferences for him to pick me up. Otherwise I was going to take the UM bus which would go to Commonwealth.