Needles Don't Bother Me

Week 6: The PET scan results came back. My chest "lit up" in the same area as the mass shown on the MRI. Not good. My oncologist sent me for an ultrasound-led biopsy to get a tissue sample. Arrived for my biopsy. The radiologist was nervous. I remained calm. He was reluctant to perform the procedure because the mass was right on top of my implant with little margin for error. He was afraid he would knick it. (By the way, I adopted the term "mass" from the doctors' lingo because I think "tumor" sounds so ugly and gross.) He decided right on-the-spot to send me down the hall for a mammogram. I obliged. When the technician who performed the mammogram took a look at the first picture, a quiet "shit" slipped out from under her breath. She re-set me and took another picture. Same boob different angle. "Shit," she said again, but louder this time. While she let me loose from the machine, I asked, "what's the matter?" She said, "come here, honey," and led me over to the light box viewer-thingy that she had been looking at. "These are calcifications." She paused. "That's why I said 'shit.'" I knew what she meant. Add it up: MRI, PET scan, ultra-sound and mamogram all pointing to the same thing. "Oh," was all I could muster. Back to the examination room to wait for the news. The radiologist came back. He asked me one more time, "are you sure you want to do this or do you want to wait to have your surgeon do an excisional biopsy?" I'm pretty certain he was secretly hoping I'd take him up on the offer so he wouldn't have to do anything. Nope. I was there; might as well get it over with. "Come on, MacGyver, you can do it." The lights were dimmed, and we watched the ultra-sound screen closely as he carefully guided the needle in and vacuumed some tissue out. Nothing else happened. Success. He told me the sample would be sent to a lab and the pathology report should be back in about a week. That was the hard part. Waiting. Not knowing with 100% certainty whether or not it was malignant.