Ali's email

Hey all - it's me again. As promised, here is the email from Ali.

Hello there

Apologies for the generic email but it’s the easiest way to contact everyone at the moment. Some of you know more than others so I’ll give a quick rundown on what’s happened so far.

Most of you are aware that after only being back at work for 2 weeks after having 7 weeks off following my hysterectomy, I found a tiny lump in my left breast. Everybody (including the doctors and us) were saying how lucky I was to have found it so soon. An ultrasound indicated that it wasn’t anything to be concerned about, however the FNA (fine needle aspirate for you ‘non lab’ people) indicated it was malignant, which was confirmed by a core biopsy a couple of days later. The lump was high grade however due to the fact that it was the only lump visible on ultrasound, and it appeared to be contained within the duct, the plan at that stage was a lumpectomy (removing just the lump) followed up by some radiation therapy. I had an MRI before the surgery which showed that it may be more widespread but still within the tissue so the plan remained the same. The MRI also showed some lesions on my liver which were thought to be haemangiomas (birth marks), these would be followed up after my other treatment as they’re nothing to worry about.

I had the surgery on 23 June and all went well, I even managed to go home on the same day, although the surgeon found a couple of other small lumps during the surgery which he removed. Friday evening of the following week we went back to see Dr Barry (my awesome surgeon) who had the histo results back from the surgery (thanks Ange for all of your late night babysitting). The news wasn’t great and the cancer had spread. The plan now was for a mastectomy (plus reconstruction) and chemotherapy, the surgery was scheduled for 22 July, the chemo would start about 3 weeks after the surgery. During the school holidays there were several tests to get done, mostly so that I’d be ready to go after the surgery with ‘baselines’ for the oncologist. One of the tests was a CT scan which I had last week (Tues I think), which showed lesions on my liver. The doctors were saying that it would be very unusual for it to have spread there so quickly and thought it would probably turn out to be the haemangiomas, but required follow up sooner rather than later. Friday last week I had a FNA of my liver, not pleasant (think very long needles stuck in your liver and jiggled around). They didn’t say anything at the time of collection but the way the radiologist held my hands at the end and said good luck made me think things weren’t great. So after a very long and anxious wait over the weekend, this afternoon my surgeon called me (from his holiday destination somewhere) with the results, which show that it has in fact spread to my liver. Apparently I’m only his 4^th patient that this has happened to out of roughly 4000 breast cancer patients that he’s treated. Andrew always said I was special…..

So the plan from here is to put the surgery on hold or maybe cancelled altogether and just get started on the chemo ASAP. I have an appointment with the newest doctor to join my team, the oncologist, on Wednesday so will know more then, her name is Alison so I figure that’s a good sign. I also have a bone scan planned for Wed which will hopefully be clear.

As you can imagine it is pretty stressful at the moment and although we talk to the kids about what is happening, we want to try and keep things as normal as possible. There are many people that have offered to come and help out and stay with us but it’s actually more stressful having people to stay. We do appreciate the offers but at this stage it’s easier if we just muddle along as usual. The offers of picking kids up from school etc have been fantastic and it’s been really useful, it helped make my recovery after the lumpectomy much easier. I don’t know how I’m going to react to the chemo but hopefully I’ll still be more than capable of dropping the kids at school and picking them up. We’ve also had the offer of a cooking roster (you know who you are!) which will be great if I get sick, I don’t want the pikelets to live off pizza and McDonalds. It’s also going to be pretty important for me to eat well. In saying that, I am having a couple of glasses of wine tonight, only to help me sleep better of course. I figure my liver is buggered anyway so it can’t hurt too much. Don’t panic, tomorrow I start on my eating lots of veges and not drinking any alcohol regime.

Please feel free to email or text. I know it sounds terrible but I’m mostly letting phone calls go to the answering machine at the moment, depending on how I’m feeling. Sometimes the distraction of talking to people about normal day to day things is a good but at other times it drives me nuts and I don’t feel like being friendly to anyone or hearing about anything. I know I need to keep thinking positively which I have been doing up until now. I think I’ll probably have a few bad days now and then but hopefully the oncologist will give me a bit of hope and a reason to think positively once again.

People have asked if I mind them telling other people about what’s going on (work and school mainly). I certainly don’t mind and in a way I hope that by hearing my story if anyone (or their partner) finds a lump, they don’t just ignore it and get it followed up with and FNA not just an ultrasound.

Andrew has been absolutely amazing and I don’t know what I’d do without him, he knows what to say and more importantly what not to say. Perhaps the psychology degree is coming in handy after all. He recently got a promotion at work which means lots of extra pressure so in terms of timing I could have done better. So far he’s managing to keep it all together at both ends so hopefully once things settle down here and we have a plan he can start to concentrate on work a bit more. I feel pretty guilty dragging him away from the office so much over the last month. He’s going to set up a blog for those of you who are interested in keeping up to date with things, as this will probably be the easiest way for everyone to know what’s happening.

For those of you that I had arranged to catch up with this week (lunches, coffees, play times with kids etc), I’ll have to take a rain check and make it another time as I just need to sort out a few things over the next week.

Take care for now.

Ali