all clear

No sign of cancer! Woo-hoo!





After numerous retakes and additional magnifications, it was decided finally that I was fine. But after the first set of images and when she said they needed additional films, I started to panic as it sounded too familiar to the day I was originally diagnosed. And the technician, polite and professional as she was, was very difficult to read. When she went to get me for a third time, she had such a grim face on, I feared the worst but all was fine. Even though I received good news, I am still trying to recover from my fear at the thought: it came back. So they were looking for 'local recurrences'. If they had found one, it would mean repeat everything except for the radiation. A mastectomy would be the treatment and a drug other than the red devil would be used as I had the lifetime allotment already. At UM, they don't look for distal recurrences unless you have symptoms or if you were node positive. At this stage, the amount of false negatives and false positives would make most screens not useful. Worrisome symptoms: unexplained cough/shortness of breath(lung mets?) jaundice/ digestive issues(liver mets?) bone pain (bone mets) headache or weird CNS symptoms (brain mets-but I did get a sneak peak at my brain-looks fine to me). As time goes on, less worry. For now, I see someone every 3 months.

I didn't sleep well last night with the what-ifs. I did have an amusing dream in which my hair was green and everyone kept insisting I had did this somehow. No it just grew that way. I am considering coloring it though-not green. Brown with blonde highlights or light blonde. This salt and pepper can-fro isn't doing it for me. I did get a nice run in before my 3 hour adventure at the cancer center and my friend lent me her car so I didn't have to run there though it would have been a nice downhill run into the river valley, I'd be a tad sweaty.