You can't hurry, love.

When you tell people you have cancer (again), you get all sorts of reactions. Some start to cry, some immediately move to hug you (I'm a hugger, so I kinda dig this one), some start to talk really fast and ask lots of random questions, some have a mini-nervous-breakdown and have to be managed by you (this is a most undesirable outcome) and some swing into "action mode." These are the people who urge you to "get it out immediately!" or "get rid of them!" (the breasts). They want to know, 3 days after your diagnosis, what your plan is.

Well folks, in the world of breast cancer, nothing moves that fast. Because unless you have inflammatory breast cancer or some other unusual case, breast cancer moves pretty slowly, so you can take your time figuring out your plan of attack. For example. Last time around with this, I took time to assemble and meet with a team at MGH (and that included a surgeon, a radiation oncologist, a medical oncologist and a social worker), get a second opinion on my pathology at a different hospital, and interview a corresponding team at Dana Farber. I knew I was going to be seeing these folks for years, and I wanted to love them. I was diagnosed on November 5, 2001 and I didn't start chemo until the second week of December. And I didn't finish up radiation until the end of July. We won't even get into how long it took to grow my hair back.

So let's take a deep breath, shall we? This go-round, it took 10 days just for the first pathology report to come in. And the only reason I had the MR-guided core needle biopsy a week after the suspicious MRI was because they want to time it with your menstrual cycle, and I was still in the zone. Now I wait 'til the 16th to meet with my dream team again - a 5 hour meeting where we'll merely skim the surface of pathology and options and next steps. My oncologist won't even be there that day. So that'll leave seeing a plastic surgeon, my oncologist and who knows who else before we move forward in any meaningful way.

I predict nothing too exciting's going to happen before latter part of July. So for all you slice 'em, dice 'em folks, you're going to need a hobby to keep you busy, 'cause quarterbacking my case is going to be dull for the moment. Get that bag of kettle corn/Cheetos/baby carrots and sit back and watch the (freak) show.

These are tough decisions. There are lots of factors to weigh, both short- and long-term. The benefit of experience in these matters is that I know that taking time and weighing options tends to lead to happiness in ultimate decisions. As in most life matters, really. And that's my most "simple" ultimate goal. To be happy and cancer-free, again.

xo

Sarah