www.cancermonster.net

Tomorrow I find out if I have cancer.

Or I should say, what kind of cancer I have. The surgery four days ago was supposed to be a simple one -an hour and another for recovery and I go home. The surgeon told me that there was little chance that the mass was malignant - a splinter from something I sat on. “More common than you might think” he said. “You would never have known it was there, but your body attacked it and didn’t know when to stop.” The antibiotics he prescribed were meant to shrink the lump, hopefully down to pea size that could be removed in the office. Instead during the two weeks I waited, the mass doubled in size. I woke up in a hospital room instead of in recovery. Six hours later. The plastic band on my wrist said “observation” under my name. The pain said “oh crap”. I just wanted to go home.

Home, by the way is a 33 foot motorhome in an RV park on the Siletz River in Lincoln City, Oregon where my three youngest kids (6, 8, and 9 years old) and I wait daily for their daddy to come home from work. Six weeks ago we bought this twenty year old class A beast and moved it to be closer to where my husband Dan has been working. He is a tile contractor working on a hotel near by. Now, it is our home full time.

But I digress…

Where was I? Oh yes, waking up in a room. I was confused. The nurse told me that my husband had gone home to relieve whomever was watching the children. That was Kelli, my 18yr old daughter and her boyfriend Tim. They came down from the Portland area for Father’s Day weekend and to watch the kids while I had my little operation. Dan went home? And I’m still here. “Why am I here?” I had pieces of drugged conversations in my head. Did Dan say “cancer” or was that my imagination? “Couldn’t get it all…” Oh no, no no. I was supposed to go home. It was just a splinter.

Dr K came in around 7:00 that night to check on me. OK, I asked them to call him because I wanted to go home. I had eaten, peed, and walked around. The IV was out and I was once again lucid. And I didn’t have insurance for this. I wanted to go home. The nurses were very nice and they tried to explain to me that whether I went home then or in the morning, the room charge would be the same. But I knew that every time they looked at me the cost would still go up. Anyway, I couldn’t stand it. So they called the doctor and he came in. (Heck of a nice guy by the way)

What I heard from the doctor would change my life forever. “Sometimes you look at a tumor and you know it is cancer and sometimes you look at a tumor and you know it’s not cancer. When I saw your tumor I was baffled. It was strange. In my experience I have to say it’s bad. 80 to 90% I say it is cancer. I may be wrong and 10 to 20% it’s not. But I don’t think I am wrong. The problem is what kind. That I cannot tell for sure. The tumor had fingers entwined in the muscle that I couldn’t cut out. If I did it would have been devastating for you. You would have been crippled for life. So I had to leave it. Radiation will shrink it so that I can take only a small part of the muscle instead of the whole muscle. You will walk with a limp but you will walk.”

Holy Crap! Radiation. Crippled. What happened to SPLINTER?

He gave my husband and I three terms to look up: Foreign Body Granuloma (the splinter theory- my favorite), Rhabdomyosarcoma (involving the Muscle), and Liposarcoma (involving fat cells). It would take five days to get the results of the pathology test. That I would need to get in his office in Portland. He said I could go home and he would see me in the morning (Sunday) at the clinic to remove the drain.

Now it’s Wednesday Night. Tomorrow I find out if I have cancer.