"LEFT" means "left"

DeAnna and I are back from outpatient surgery... After some chicken noodle soup and a toasted english muffin with butter, she's now curled up on the couch, doing just fine. She was a trooper (anyone out there surprised?).

Let me rewind a bit and give you a quick rundown of the afternoon: noon arrival at Grant hospital, free valet parking, quick check in at the front desk. We were directed upstairs to the Abulatory Surgery waiting room where we met a VERY pleasant nurse who really knew her stuff.

Grant has a fantastic system for family and friends: she handed me a pager they would use to notify me when D was done that would work anywhere in the hospital AND the public library across the street (BONUS!). In the waiting room, they also have a computerized patient status system mounted to the wall. In short, DeAnna was a assigned a patient number and I could use to check where she was in the process simply by finding her number in the appropriate column on the monitor (ie waiting to be checked in, surgery, recovery, etc)- think ariport arrival/departure monitors- BRILLIANT!

We barely had time to take off our coats and have a seat in the waiting area before a volunteer came to whisk DeAnna away to get her prepped and ready to go.

About a half an hour later, I was permitted to go back to the prepping area with her. There, I found her all gowned-up, covered in warm blankets and in good spirits. (They had also marked the word "LEFT" right below her collar bone on her left side, in case they forgot where they were supposed to go once they had her sedated and could no longer ask HER, I suppose. Where's my camera when I need it?!?) We were able to sit and giggle together for about a half an hour before they whisked her away a final time to surgery.

Couple of hours later, I was paged, informed by the friendly nurse that she was out of surgery and doing well. She pointed me to a small private room where I met with Dr.Liang, her surgeon, to get the official scoop.

The results are as follows: the port went in easily. No problems there. As planned, Dr.Liang also performed the excisional biopsy, removing a hardened lump from DeAnna's breast, as well as a bit of surrounding tissue. She had a pathologist waiting right there to do an on-the-spot test of the tissue. Much to Dr.Liang's surprise, it came up negative. Benign. No cancer found.

Hm. Crap.

So where does DeAnna proceed from here? Dr.Liang is... well... stumped! She is still recommending following through with the chemo, treating this as occult breast cancer; attack this stuff wherever it's setting up shop. DeAnna still has to tough it out through a few more tests (the painless ones, at least- another MRI and ultrasound) to make ABSOLUTELY sure they're not missing anything before they get started with the chemo. So the plan has not changed, post-surgery.

Worst case scenario is that DeAnna has a mastectomy some where in her future. But one thing at a time: more tests, chemo (bye bye eyebrows!), surgical removal of the offending lymph nodes.

WHEW.

DeAnna says "hi" from the couch, by the way :) She just informed me that "the only thing that hurts is my boob!" Yeah, that's going in the blog, too :)