To get there, they injected my joints with something radioactive and took pictures of my right hip. As other survivors will know, I got "the call" from my primary care doctor. "The call," for the uninitiated is what happens when the doctors are worried. The doctor has decided that whatever it is that they are looking at can't wait until your next regularly scheduled appointment.
You may know you were being tested and be expecting a call, or you may get the sneaker "call" after a run of the mill, not-looking-for-cancer test: "Amanda, I got the report from the imaging, and there is something we need to check out. It looks like your uterine lining is too thick."
In the exam and biopsy, my doctor casually dropped, "It's sad when the medicines they give you for one cancer could give you another one." There I lay, neck craned, peering at her through my styrup held legs, shocked.
At the 21, when I decided my course of treatment, I knew the risks. I had been told you have x in a huge number chance of lymphoma, x in a huge chance of luekemia, x in a 1000 chance of endometrial. The risks seemed reasonable compared to a 1 in 2 chance* of my cancer killing me with treatment. *This was a number I found on a reputable, vetted website. The doctors never confirmed nor denied it. They tended to redirect all attempts at discussing it. So who knows if it is actually true.
Anyhow, I left the probing (painful), I went to our basement apartment, I crawled into the shower, I sobbed, and I chanted, "not that, not that, I can have babies without breasts, but not without that." Pity party complete, I looked at my date book and saw that I had an oncology check in a few days away. So I waited, vacillating between stoicism and premature grief.
The biopsy was negative. I got the call on Thursday. In my oncology appointment that Friday, I sat with my doctor, and he and I discussed the scare. I asked him, if I should go off the drugs. He soothed my worries and explained that the drug I was on didn't cause the cancer, it just created a space for it, if it was going to happen.
"It would be short-sighted to stop the drug now," he said, "The breast cancer is more of a risk, at this point." I breathed a breath in, and I heard what I needed to. I took the full course of the drugs.
6 months after I had completed the treatment two or three years later, my husband rushed me to the hospital at 5:00 a.m. I was again, sobbing. This time, I sobbed from a deep grinding agnoy writhing in my belly. In the hospital, once again in the styrups, looking at yet another doctor through my legs, I watched as he peered into my vagina. "It looks like a clot," he said, as he took a shiny, slick pair of tweezers and pulled on what I imagined a small thread of clotted blood.
His eyebrows went up, a metallic smell rushed into the room, and my back, my legs, his face were wet, warm, and glistening with blood. "It's like Mount Vesuvius down here." The pain went away. Off the doctor went, in came the imaging person. She looked at the ultrasound as I told her about the first scare, and she said, "Well they'll have to do something now."
They did do something, and I did get "the call again." This time, in person, my sweet OBGYN that I met and knew for the first time in the hospital before my D and C, told me "It's cancer." "Well that's peachy" was all I could say. The crying happened later.
With cancer treatment, it's all about risk and reward. The drugs they give you, the surgery they use, the radiation they beam, is all directed at eliminating the cells. Damn the consequences. It's done this way, because we don't know any other way to do it. At the end though, you, the patient, are left holding the bag: a long list of chronic health conditions that almost all have no effective or known treatment.
Was it worth it? I don't know. There's a chance that my cancer wouldn't have come back without the long treatment. There's a chance it would have just stopped with surgery and radiation. In the room, with the first oncologist, 8 years ago, when he said, "the pathologist watched the cancer cells highjacking blood cells. It's most likely already spread outside the breast," the risks and rewards seemed clear. Today? Most of the time, I still think I made the right choice.
P.S. Prevention information on endometrial cancer. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24035559. Side note: the drug I was on is also a known risk factor....
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