Monday, May 3, 2010

Cars & Women

I almost titled this post "breast feeding" but thought that may turn off some of the men reading this blog. Hence the new title (could I be anymore stereotypical?). This post actually has nothing to do with cars or women. Well, unless I count as a woman, which I suppose I do...

But I digress. It is frustrating to me that no one seems to know how long x-ray dyes and barium and radioactive tracers stay in your body or whether or not they are excreted in breast milk. I am trying to feed my baby as much as possible before I have to start chemo and switch to formula, and I have some people telling me "wait 8 hours" and others telling me "wait 2-3 days." So yeah, frustrating. There's my rant for the day.

My bone scan from today came back fine. Thank you God! I spoke with Beth about the pathology, and they have it narrowed down to 3 things. But let me say before I say what those three things are that you're going to hear that scary "P" word again, and I'll explain why it keeps coming up but isn't anymore of a possibility today than it was before. They have narrowed it to pancreatic, bile ducts inside the liver or bile ducts outside the liver. I asked Beth, "WHY do they keep saying pancreatic when my pancreas is fine??" She explained that the Pathologist at Froedtert doesn't look at any of my other scans or results. He only looks at the samples, and he has come to the same conclusions that the original Pathologist did. So nothing has changed. They have not found anything since last week that now makes them think it is pancreatic. They still just don't know. I will eventually see an oncologist who will put the pieces together.

Next step: an appointment with Dr. Evans tomorrow at 5:00 p.m. to talk about where we go from here. Please pray that there is a way for them to definitively diagnose me, and that they diagnose me with something that can be easily treated. A few weeks back, I would have thought myself nuts for praying this prayer, but here it is: God, please have them tell me it's liver cancer, and that it can be treated.

I also have to say how grateful I am for our dear family friend from way back, Marge Voigt. She spent the day with Eva and myself at the hospital, and then cooked dinner for Matt and me. She was wonderful encouraging company, and I very much appreciate her spending the day with us. Oh, and she also cleaned up Eva's exploding diaper while I was in my bone scan. :)

Alright, time to go pump & dump my radioactive breast milk. That's the reality.

Peace to you!

1 comment:

  1. Praying, dear! I guess our prayers that the doctors would look and not find any cancer are having unintended consequences? :P

    Something cool: the liver is the only internal organ that regenerates. So they could remove a huge portion of it and it'll grow back. :)

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