Hi everyone,
I’m finding this forum so very helpful especially at 3am when I’m pacing the floor and checking my inbox. Diagnosed end of July and mastectomy with diep reconstruction scheduled for 17 Oct,fingers crossed. Seems like a lifetime!
Has anyone else experienced pains in other parts of the body since diagnosis? I feel every twitch and ache is linked, feel like I have insects crawling on my head at times and some throbbing headaches. Burning pain under the arm like I’ve shaved too closely and this last week feel like the lump has grown and the breast hurts. Am I going insane?
Every billboard I see, advert, radio, chat show I switch on is about cancer, never noticed this before.
Feeling anxiety around the duration of surgery as never had an op in my life. Then recovery and having to wait for pathology results.
Sorry you are having such a tough time but it does end. It kind of has for me today with my post surgery pathology results which were even better than I could have hoped for. I went through all the anxiety that you list since being told I had DCIS with a small number of invasive cancer cells on 5th August. Since then I have worried about it spreading with each torturous wait for results and surgery.
I had a WLE with therapeutic mammoplasty and sentinel lymph node biopsy on 19th September and have worried since that it would be in the lymph nodes and the margins wouldn’t be clear and trying not to but failing to imagine the worst case scenarios. This morning I found that my worries were just a product of my imagination. The margins and lymph nodes were clear and I haven’t even been walking about with invasive cancer cells as it turns out they were all removed during the vacuum assisted biopsy I had on 22nd July, all that time thinking they were multiplying and spreading and they weren’t even there anymore! All that was left for the surgeon to remove was a 28mm area of DCIS. I still have a way to go before the whole awful experience is over as I have to have radiotherapy but I now feel that it will end and my life will become my own again.
I hope you can get through the next few days until your surgery without too much trauma, although it isn’t now long for you to wait I know from experience that it will seem like ages to you. I also hope you recover well from surgery and get good post surgery pathology results and that once you have had the surgery the wait for the results won’t be as difficult as the waiting beforehand.