June 1 Visit with the new Doctor - Dr. Roeder

We went to Dr. Roeder's office this morning armed with all the films and pathology reports and the CD of the MRI and all the medical information we could drum up. Thank you to all the family who helped with Sally's quest for more knowledge for the medical history.

The new news is that she wants me to go back up to Scottsdale (so it is the same MRI machine) and have an MRI guided biopsy of the newly found spots on the right side. It has to be MRI because they didn't show up on the mammogram or the sonogram. Then, after that information comes back - we will have a better idea of where things are going next. She wants to see if the spots on the right side might be the same cancer (just earlier) as the left side. That will change the outcome of the treatment plan.
I do actually feel lucky that there is all this fancy 'medical foo foo' stuff available for my very own personal use. I am also feeling very lucky that we have insurance. We didn't, the last biopsy I had to have.

I told Sara that it was very lucky for me and my breast cancer diagnosis that I was raised on a farm in Kansas, because that is where there was a combine for me to fall off of (Mom's story, anyway - I don't remember that part). I presume it was just off the ladder and then I hit my chest on another rung?-- anyway - sometime later I had my first breast/chest surgery to remove the 'watery cyst'. Lamar, Colorado, St. Mary's hospital. I remember wearing a beautiful pink chiffony-ish (nylon?) dress with lace. I remember trying to count backwards from 100 with the ether mask over my face, and I remember the nuns helping me dress or undress - and then Mom driving me home. This is I think my first memory.
So---I now have a 4 inch scar on my chest, and 50 years (!) later I'm old enough that it is loose enough from the rest of the chest wall for that scar to come up into the mammogram picture. Lucky again.
Then I decide to check myself and find the lump - among many. luck again. When they go for the second mammogram, it doesn't show up , but when I remember to ask them to check in this other place while they are doing the sonogram - there it is -- the lump. So - they recommend, and I go for, the biopsy, and the one tiny piece they were able to get before I tried to bleed out - contained a specimen of two kinds of cancer. Lucky lucky that they got the right piece in that small grape-sized spot! Now, I just want all that luck to continue! And I feel it will because I now have the doctor that I wanted in the first place and I love her and feel very very comfortable with her. And her decisions. And recommendations. Lucky me. Now I'm waiting to hear when I go to Phoenix - she thought it would be in a week and a half or so. ???? Waiting till Monday to find out when I go. Thank you all for all the wonderful thoughts and prayers and love - I do feel very loved. Thank you... All my love to you, Patty