Great Appointment Today!

I met with the surgeon who will be performing my bilateral mastectomy today.
As she examined my breasts and lymph nodes, her remarks were, "This is remarkable. Truly remarkable. Your tissue feels like a normal exam. I am not feeling any inflamed areas or lumps. I think that you may be one of the 10-15% of people who enter surgery with no signs of cancer. This is the best case scenario."

She also thought it was pretty great that I responded this well to chemo after only two chemo treatments to date. I told her, while I appreciate the medicine, I'm pretty sure God had something to do with it. :)

My mastectomy has been scheduled for January 3rd. It will take about one hour to remove them. It's a little sad considering it took so long to grow them.

The plastic surgeon will put tissue expanders in right after. That should take another hour. He will have to cut through muscle to place them in my chest wall. They say it's pretty painful and that the 'mounds' will be hard, too high and too big. I will have to wear drains for about a week following and will have limited movement. I will also spend two nights in the hospital.
I'm mentally prepared for the pain. I have my eye on the prize.....NEW CANCER-FREE BOOBS!
Reconstruction surgery will *probably* be scheduled in May.

The kids and I painted our 'practice pumpkins'. In honor of breast cancer awareness month, a ribbon seemed like the best choice for mine. I am soooo not an artist.

I have my third chemo tomorrow afternoon. One of my besties, Jamie, will be driving from Wisconsin to sit with me at the clinic. I'm so excited to chat with her for 4 whole hours! What a great friend to leave her triplets for the day, drive to Minnesota and spend her day surrounded by cancer patients. It sounds like a depressing day, but really, the people at the clinic are all in pretty good spirits and the staff is fabulous.

The last time we got together for that long, we were on an airplane headed to Georgia.
While we sat on the tarmac at 8 am and waited for the wings to be de-iced, a gentleman (I use that term loosely) turned around, looked at us and said, "Do your husbands drink heavily?"
He obviously didn't like our excited banter. Unfortunately for him, it just made us giggle louder and talk more.
I hope he learned his lesson. If you don't have something nice to say, shut the hell up! :)

Thanks again for everything. You guys have not stopped praying for my family. I love you to death. Seriously.