starting the process

 It's been a long month, but today was finally the day of my appointment with the surgeon… It seemed like I had to wait forever, although I was pretty good about putting things out of my mind and keeping an optimistic outlook. Perhaps I had a tiny bit of denial which kept me in a good frame of mind - I wasn't dwelling or awfulizing! My daily walk with Kirsten has kept me motivated and on the right track with proper nutrition and exercise - it’s helped to walk away any anxiety that I might have felt!

My surgery has been tentatively scheduled for May 30th, but that has to be confirmed. There will be several appointments before that but those have yet to be arranged and I'm not really sure what they are for... Carm was there taking notes, but that's one place where we fell down! The doctor is pretty certain that I will be having radiation but chemo is unlikely - that will be confirmed once they do the pathology on the lump and lymph nodes that they remove. It seems to me that one of my upcoming appointments will be to inject dye into my lymph nodes to identify the ‘sentinel’ node.

The doctor thinks that I will get 5 to 20 radiation treatments, depending on what they find. I can't remember if I'll be seeing the radiation oncologist before or after surgery - probably after.

There is a small chance (10%), that the ‘margins’ won't be good enough and they'd have to do another surgery which would be a drag - my cousin had a similar thing and she said the second worst thing was having the second surgery so fingers crossed!

Dr. Carrier has lots of experience doing this surgery (he is pretty young though!) and gave both Carm and I a feeling of confidence.

I do want to thank everyone who reached out with their success stories - it helps so much :-) I feel pretty optimistic although I am having a bit of a crash in that area this afternoon, I guess it suddenly seems a bit overwhelming and has become more real. Still, I know that it will be a walk in the park compared to what Mom went through - if she can troop through that horror, my little hiccup will seem easy.

The local hospital is becoming more familiar than I'd like as our friend P is still there (3 weeks now!) so I've been trying to visit on a regular basis. I even have a favourite parking spot!

Oh! My bruises are gone and I have no new ones so it looks like the omega 3 was to blame! Carm is taking it without issue so I'm just an oddity…

I've been so focused on diet and health that I've not been making meals that are worthy of guests so we've been hermits… Carm is a good sport about it and hasn't been pressuring me for better eats, in fact he's fully on board and starting to lose a bit of weight himself :-)  I did trott out my favourite lentil recipe for Cathey on Saturday - I fed her caramelised onion lentils & rice, with a side of a few vegetables. Not fancy!

Tomorrow we take the trailer in for a new set of treads - ugh, which means backing into the laneway again… not my favourite activity and already I feel anxiety about it. Nothing like compounding things…

And for a treat tonight, chicken shawarma was on the menu! (big garlicy burp)...

Awesome!

“art!”

“gorgeous tulips”

“a sunny morning”

“getting the process going”

“garlic”