the C word

I feel like with any huge life event, good or bad, there is a lot of opportunity for growth. And wow, this is HUGE. I usually see more growth in myself when I write stuff down, so here we go. Because there's no way I'm going through this and hopefully not coming out of it a little better in the end! I hope!

So.

The beginning of my cancer journey. I keep saying this, but I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS REAL. It's just crazy.

So a little background, because we keep getting this question: how did we find this? 

So, I stopped nursing Faye back like the end of March. Once I started losing "volume" if you will, I noticed a lump pretty immediately. But of course wasn't worried because I thought, "oh it's probably just a clogged duct" or something nursing related. Because I wasn't worried, I really wasn't keeping track of size or anything. I honestly just thought it would go away. Anyways, fast forward a few months and it definitely wasn't shrinking or anything, and it had started to feel tender and such. Still wasn't feeling super worried, but I did feel like it was strange that it hadn't gone away. Just randomly one day I decided to call my OBGYN about it, seriously still not worried, and they told me they wanted an ultrasound and to schedule an appointment with a surgeon. It was at that point I thought "Oh crap. Could this actually be something?"

***A little sidenote: A lot of you may know, and many of you not, this is not the first time cancer has struck in my immediate family. My mom fought breast cancer, twice, a little over ten years ago. And we lost my sister to adrenocortical carcinoma when I was 6. This is part of the reason why this has rocked our world so hard. We all feel like "How is this POSSIBLE? How could this be happening for the third time?!" It's literally 50% of us now. It's just crazy***

So I got on the schedule at the Huntsman for an ultrasound, but it was over 2 weeks away. After everything I started reading online (I KNOW I KNOW, dr google isn't the best. But in this case, it's actually helped me a lot), I was feeling super anxious about getting in sooner. Thankfully I got rescheduled so that worked out, and on July 27, we were up at a clinic in Farmington for the ultrasound. Pretty immediately, the tech felt like something didn't look right. She could see lots of calcifications, which I've since learned can be a big indicator of cancer. The head radiologist came in and took a look, and found a lymph node that looked concerning, so right there they decided they needed to do a mammogram. Same story. Pretty immediately they could tell something was not right. They showed us the images, and we could easily see it too. It's crazy how big this mass is. It's basically the length of my entire breast, about 10cm. To put that in perspective, a stage 4 (the highest stage) tumor only has to be 5cm. CUE FREAKOUT. Because of what they could see on the mammo, they wanted to do a biopsy right then too. Huge weird needles and some strange pain in my armpit, but nothing terrible. The doctor was so kind. She kept saying "Man I really wish I could tell you I wasn't concerned about this, but I really am." I told her at the end "I'm just shocked you aren't telling me this isn't nursing related. I would have bet my life that's how this was going to go." She surprised me when she said "Even with your family history, that's absolutely what I was thinking initially too. I'm sorry that's not what's ended up happening." I'm so so grateful for those nice women. In hindsight, I'm sure they knew this was more serious than they were letting on because they were SO KIND to us. I'm forever grateful for that. 

So we left the office basically like "What the hell? Did we just discover that I have CANCER?!" The next 7 days were the absolute longest in my whole friggin life. Like WHY DO YOU HAVE TO WAIT SO LONG TO HEAR WHETHER OR NOT YOU HAVE CANCER?! My parents were so kind and drove up from Arizona to keep us company while we waited for the news. There's NO way I would have been able to survive that week if they hadn't been here. I was seriously a wreck those first few days. Couldn't hardly eat or sleep, the works. Waiting to find out if you have cancer or not is about as terrible as it sounds. And they completely saved us. Another thing I will be forever grateful for. So anyways, I think we were all just preparing ourselves for the bad news because that's really what I sounded like was coming. Which I am also grateful for, because mentally preparing for that was actually pretty helpful. 

So then I got the call that Wednesday morning, August 2. 

Yep. Cancer indeed. 

And boy did the ball start rolling then. Lots of phone calls to friends and family, and my phone started ringing like crazy with calls from the doctor getting more things scheduled. First on the docket was an appointment with my surgeon the following day. THAT APPOINTMENT WAS SO BOMB. We could really feel everyone's prayers for us that day. Our surgeon, Dr. Matsen, is fantastic. We've come to find out she's a great explainer, which is probably why we were at the hospital for literally 5 hours that day haha. We also met with a genetic counselor, all the nurses, a research.... lady.... haha, and a social worker. So many awesome people helping us out. Getting more information (staging, my likely treatment plan, tumor size, etc) was great. The unknown is absolutely the worst part of all of this.

SO.

Stage 2B ductal invasive carcinoma. Stage 2B because it's spread to the one lymph node, that they know of, and the tumor is larger than 2cm. Hormone receptor positive, meaning estrogen is especially feeding the tumor's growth. They actually want me to do chemo first, which is not what we expected. The mass is large enough, as is the lymph node, that they want to do chemo and shrink everything a little bit first so the surgery can be less invasive. Before we can start chemo however, we have to do fertility preservation, which is essentially IVF without a pregnancy at the end. So we have been doing that for about two weeks, and then we will hopefully have 2-5 embryos to freeze at the end. It's so hard to wrap me head around how much that has changed for our family the last month. Everything we've thought about how we are going to keep having children is kind of nonexistent now. Crazy. So then once we have our embryos, I can start chemo. Which shockingly, I'm actually looking forward to. Not looking forward to chemo itself, but it's been so hard feeling panicked and stressed about all of this, but pretty much every day NOTHING is happening to fix the problem. Just lots of appointments and more stress being added.

So yay for chemo haha.

And that's kind of where we are now. Thanks for bearing with me as I share all of this. It's as much a coping mechanism for me as it is a desire to stay connected. Stay tuned for some more big things. Unfortunately lots more has happened in the last few weeks, and it's just way too much to explain in this same post.