After Surgery...

Two weeks after surgery, the fluid and blood accumulated under my arms and they caused my already flabby arm to look like...even flabbier arm. So Ms Aina had an MO aspirated the fluid out using a syringe. I healed speedily after that.

Then on the 11th of March I went to see my Onco, who was never around the first time I battled cancer in 2004. I brought her an update from Ms Aina because surprise, surprise... no Onco turned up for the combine meeting held a week prior. It was decided during the meeting that I was to have a C-sec at 30 weeks, and chemo about 2 weeks after that. After I voiced my concerned about the baby being borned at 3o weeks gestation to the onco...with the risks of lungs failure, infection, brain haemorrhage, apnea...she agreed to let the delivery be delayed to 32 weeks. "At patient preference" she told her MO to write in my file, in case I brought it against her in the future. And chemo was to start 4 weeks after that.

I was also told that this is not a recurrence, but a second primary, meaning a new cancer unrelated to the first one although they appear to share most characteristics: grade 3 tumor, triple negative...

I would have preferred to have chemo start earlier, probably 3 weeks after c-sec, because as always I'll recover fast. but the Onco couldn't know that could she? Because she wasn't always around...

A week may not seem much of a wait to anybody else but to a cancer patient...they are days worth counting.

I remembered when I went to Kinokuniya in KLCC with Aishah (HI CHAH!!) to look for Chicken Soup for the Breast Cancer Survivors' Soul, I came across an interesting book I so wanted to read but dare not buy. The title runs something like What Your Doctors Do Not Tell You. I flipped to the pages that concern me and it asks a very thought- provoking question...
"Why is it that a cancer patient survival is always evaluated at a five year time frame, not ten or twenty?"
The common believe is that if you pass the 5-year mark, you are considered "cured", which is stupid as cancer cannot be cured, unlike chicken pox!! I don't believe in that shit much because I've met people who relapsed after 7 and 10 years.
The book insists that chemo or whatever drug is available out there is only able to put you in remission for 5 years, if you are lucky. Most cancer patients die of cancer, sooner or later, depending on which is faster... the car speeding down the road or the cancer cells.

I personally do not care which comes first, as long as it doesn't come anytime soon. I don't mind dying, but I worry about my children. It's damn difficult not to believe in statistics with 11 lymph node positive for regional mets... and I keep hoping for a miracle...for me...