How I discovered I was growing cancer, part 2

So on my last post I left off with a scheduled diagnostic mammo and ultrasound.  God bless the wonderful woman in scheduling who lead the charge to get me in for the imaging and follow-up with a (now "my") breast surgeon all on one day within 3 days of my gyn appointment.

The mammo was fairly uninteresting from a patient point of view, but the ultrasound was where I started to understand what was really going on.    

My lump barely showed on the US, the technologist (wonderful calm and caring woman) could feel the lumps but had to do some work to image the shadowy difference on the US.

I think the procedures are probably a little different from facility to facility, but where I receive my care the radiologist came in at the end of the US exam to look at the results, talk to the ultrasonographer, and talk to me.

Now, radiologists a lot of times get a reputation as being something akin to cave-dwellers.  Diagnostic imaging has changed the face of medicine and radiologists--those are the doctors who read images, the techs who take them are radiologic (or MRI or CT or whatever) technologists--oftentimes spend their day in dimly-lit rooms looking at images and never having to speak to a single patient.  The reputation is more or less based on the kind of person who would think that was a great way to spend a day.

Fortunately for me, there are some who seem to go into the specialty for other reasons, or at least can make a successful switch to patient interaction mode when need be.

I was lucky to have the kind with good people skills.

So, she comes into the room and talks with me and the ultrasonographer.  She tells me there were calcifications on the mammogram that were worrying her.  I said something like, "so they're not cysts?"  and she said they were not.

Honestly, it wasn't what she said but how she said it that really hit me.  Later, between that visit and the results of my biopsy, my mom tried to tell me I was worrying for nothing because she googled it and lots of people have calcificatitons (I believe she was going for sort of advanced technique in, "there, there, it's not so bad,").  All I can say was the radiologist's tone and serious face made it pretty clear that these were not the kind of calcifications that usually mean nothing.  And the "not cysts" statement had an underlying unspoken, "No way in heck are these just cysts" lurking somewhere just beneath it.

So that's when I began to understand I could be in some serious trouble.

A few hours after the ultrasound, I saw the breast surgeon for the first time--my breast surgeon is great at talking with people, great at explaining things, great at making you feel comfortable, like my radiologist he goes against type--he talked a bit about the imaging reports and mentioned that they didn't image like most cancer but they were still suggestive.

"Suggestive of...?" I asked.

"Of cancer," he clarified.

Ok, I really did know the entire day was more or less centered around looking for cancer, but it just seemed so otherworldly, I couldn't quite make my brain fill it in without hearing it flat out.

So, as he suggested, we scheduled a biopsy a few days later, at the end of the week, and a follow-up with him in the middle of the next week.  Since you've seen the title of my blog and are, no doubt, more than smart enough to put two and two together, you probably already know how that biopsy worked out for me.