We left early for the hospital. While we were driving I found myself wishing that I had written down my thoughts before we left. I was having a difficult time processing how I felt about what lay ahead. I felt scared, only slightly nervous. I knew I could do it. I often remembered what a friend said about making my body a living sacrifice, just letting the doctors do what they needed to do. I knew this, but I still felt the fear overtaking my body. I was frozen, yet focused and ready to get it over with.
I began at the Breast Center (yes, the name of the place is on the building, a definite sign that there is too much breast cancer when they get their own building). This was the same place I had my second mammogram. They took a lot of pictures and placed a wire in my breast. This wire was a roadmap for the doctor to know exactly where to go.
Next they wheeled me to the nuclear medicine lab where I laid on a table that rolls back and forth. They injected me with blue dye and a radioactive solution. They rolled me under a camera so they could watch where the dye went. It quickly began traveling to one of my lymph nodes. They took many more pictures. The worst part was that I had to keep my arm over my head for over 30 minutes and it fell into a painful sleep.
Once that was over, I went to pre-op. They gave me an IV, asked questions, took my blood pressure and temperature. I only had a little bit of a wait there. I laid there for a few minutes all alone waiting for the next step. I stared at the pale yellow curtain and wondered if they had made a mistake. This couldn’t be real. This couldn’t be happening to me. I have the best health of most people I know. They must be making it up so they can make more money. Maybe they looked at someone else’s mammogram. How was this real? But it was real, it was happening and nothing was going to make it stop.
They gave me anti-nausea drugs then they gave me the relaxing drug. I enjoyed the relaxing drug. I felt relaxed and peaceful. They wheeled me to the operating room, this is where the relaxing drug was good to have, the operating room was not very inviting. It was big and cold and sterile and filled with more people than I could identify. I wasn’t able to see all that was there clearly, but I knew that it was good I wasn’t fully coherent. My scared factor would have soared. They put compression boots on my legs, then asked me to breathe deeply into the oxygen mask.
The next thing I remember a nurse was waking me up telling me I did good.
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