This morning I had my scheduled breast MRI, not normally a freak-out occurring for me, but for last September's trials and tribulations. If you don't remember last September, well, I think those are song lyrics, but trust me, it's not worth revisiting.
Based on that historical event, the MRI freaked me out a bit. After a missed attempt on my IV we finally got the ball rolling and spent 40 minutes trapped in a tube. Yay. From there I moved directly to a chest x-ray (mostly because I missed my August appointment, oops). We had breakfast in the three hours we had to kill before heading to an appointment with yet another breast specialist (our third in five years). She delivered the repeat/rewind September news: the "mass" noticed in September was in fact smaller, but there was another suspicious area on the other side that they wanted to take a second look at. To give her credit, she realized immediately that our staying overnight was going to be a pain, so she called around and was able to squeeze us into the ultrasound. I literally had to take off my gown before an exam even happened in order to make it to the ultrasound on time. The tech couldn't find the suspicious area (I thought a good sign!) and the radiologist who came in to check her work was the same doctor who'd flagged my MRI. She was almost apologetic... said she wished she could flag the MRI with a note that said, "I'm not worried, but...." The ultrasound showed absolutely no abnormality, so yay, back to the specialist's appointment. She and my oncologist worked out a schedule and she "released" me from the Breast Care Center's care. On to oncology..
Pretty uneventful here... essentially we'll be backing out of my quarterly chest x-rays, not so much because I've graduated, but because the tests don't really see what we need. The new plan is basically to continue the breast MRI (which is actually to look at my non-existent left side, not the right, which we previously thought) once a year, and to do a chest CT once a year. That's still ultimately less testing, but it's the freak-Trela-out kind... ah well, what can you do? Sounds like I'll have an appointment every six months for the next two years, one at Mayo (MRI) and one more locally. At that point, we'll have hit five years... then we re-evaluate. Of course I'm discouraged to not be dismissed from care, but as we discussed at one point in the appointment, I'm no longer a priority at Mayo (it took three months to get this appointment, when I was first diagnosed, it took three days).
It's sometimes good to be unimportant.
Carpe diem. -- Trela
