More on those healthy lymph nodes

My recovery has continued to go pretty well. There’s been a fair amount of discomfort, mostly from the drains, but not too much pain, and the pain I have had has been pretty intermittent and decreasing a little every day I think. I realized after a couple day or so with no oxycodone at all, that it helped to take one pill at night, just to cut the pain down a little, which in turn increases my mobility, which in turn reduces the pain. One pill isn’t enough to cause constipation, and it’s at night so I don’t feel as tired and fuzzy-headed during the day (though the dreams on oxy are a bit weirder than usual – one night I dreamt a whole long saga about rescuing myself and my sister from kidnappers, with the help of the hosts and other guests at the bed and breakfast we & our kidnappers were staying at!).

Don just returned home from Indy, and we are happy to be reunited. Rachel is still here, leaving tomorrow morning.  I’m hopeful that I may get my drains removed on Tuesday along with my stitches. One of them has been below the threshold for removal for several days, but they didn’t want to remove it yesterday when I talked to the nurse; the other one now appears to be tapering a little. I’m told that at this point most of the discomfort I’m feeling is due to the drains. And the drains limit how far I can stretch during the PT exercises, because I’m not supposed to pull on the drains or stitches.

One piece of good news from the surgery which we heard about the day after was that, not only did they find no cancer in my lymph nodes, but Dr. Wilke said the lymph nodes looked to her like they had not had any cancer before the chemo either. She said if they had, they would have looked scarred, but they looked normal (actually I think she gave them particular descriptors like plump and healthy but I can’t remember what they were). So, this relieved the part of me that was a little worried about what seemed to be her “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy – before chemo she said we would be less likely to find cancer in my lymph nodes after chemo, and “you don’t want me to find cancer in your lymph nodes!”

In case I haven’t explained this before, or if you missed it, the main reasoning behind their recommendation to do chemo first before surgery, was this: 1) cancer in the breast doesn’t kill you – it only kills you if it leaves the breast and attacks other organs; 2) chemo is what protects the rest of the body from the possibility of breast cancer cells that have migrated from the breasts, via the lymph nodes, to other parts of the body (this is called metastatic breast cancer); 3) if you leave the breast tumors in place during the chemo, you can see whether or not they are shrinking, indicating whether or not you’ve got the right chemo to protect the rest of the body, whereas if you remove the tumors and then do chemo, you just have to trust that it’s working.

So, the upshot is that I have no reason to worry about metastatic breast cancer. I hope I will be able to maintain that perspective!