MRI Part II: The biopsy

 

Wow, today was a wild zooming day. We had a very weepy evening last night. Melissa came over and cried with us and then eventually made us dinner which we all choked down, sometimes crying, nearly always nauseous. It was probably our hardest night of all. Then Michael and I woke up early and cried then. 

There are things to say about what it means to lose a body part, about the horror of reading reconstruction options and people’s stories about them, but I’ll save that for another night. Tonight I’ll just give the action about today.

We flew up to Auckland and went to the clinic. The doctor there tried to see what the MRI had shown so that she could biopsy that (to decide whether the “highly suspicious” tissue was cancer as the MRI report had said). It was hard to find for her and we talked about the ways it could be cancer or could just be “young breasts.” (This was the high point of my day, being told I had “young breasts.”) She could see some pieces that might be suspicious and might be ordinary. She went off to talk with the surgeon about what to do.

Stan (the surgeon) suggested the ultrasound assisted biopsy, but if it came back as not cancer, we would then need to get an MRI assisted biopsy at some point next week. This nearly made me cry in the appointment room: the best (kind of) outcome would be to have a cancerous result because otherwise I’d need to put off the surgery again and have another, more terrible biopsy (the MRI biopsy is worse than the regular one). And then have a full mastectomy. Are we having fun yet?

I asked whether we could skip the regular biopsy and go straight to MRI assisted (which would be conclusive). Could we get an appointment this week? She went off to check. Very few doctors do this tricky procedure, and none in the right clinic on Thursday or Friday. I was despondent. She went off again to check one more thing and ultimately came back triumphant: they could do the MRI assisted biopsy today if we went right over! We raced.

The nurse was amazed we had gotten an appointment with no notice. She said that not only does that never happen, but that this doctor who would be doing the biopsy was the best she’d ever seen. She was not uniformly positive, though. She picked up my wrist to put the line in for the sedative and the contrast. “So you’ve started chemo already?” she said, looking at my scrawny wrists. “No, just diagnosed on Friday,” I said. She looked back at my wrist. “Wow, really?”

“Doesn’t it hurt more if you put it there?” I asked, as she put the thing (what is this called? A pick line?) in my wrist.

“No, no--it’s way more convenient for us this way,” she assured me. (Which wasn’t the question.)

And so on. It felt a little like a comedy of, not errors but of those eastern European nurses who think pain is sort of good for you. And they might be sort of right. Right to the end of the procedure when she applied copious (and painful) amounts of pressure to the wounds and when I noted that it really hurt she said, “I bet.” I knew the whole thing would be funny after all.

The biopsy assisted MRI was actually not so bad at all (note that this is the new “not so bad”). The sedative (“Just think of it as a gin and tonic,” she said) was a delight. I wish I had some right now. It took a long time (2.5 hours) as they tried to find the right place to biopsy. I had a sense, as they wheeled me in and out of the MRI, of a set of engineers searching for oil or coal or gold, core sample after core sample drilled deep. They took 10 samples, and the doctor said he was confident that if there was cancer there, he’d gotten a good sample of it.

Mostly, though, I was just consumed with delight. The impossible hope of an MRI biopsy (which is something I’ve never ever hoped for before) came true within hours of its conception. I’ll have the result on Friday and with it a clean decision about a lumpectomy or a mastectomy. Surgery Tuesday in any case. Some things begin to click into place, and even if they aren’t my very favourite things in the world, at least they get me closer to the other side.

I can feel the love and support coming towards me. I am grateful beyond words.