Life

 Well, my life has been going pretty good. I've had a follow up appointment with my radiation oncologist, plastic surgeon and medical oncologist. They've all had good things to say. I've graduated to a check up in six months with my radiation oncologist and then probably just a yearly check up. With my plastic surgeon, well there are still a few things going on with the reconstruction. 

So the surgery went great and everything was looking good. A couple weeks maybe three weeks out I started noticing some tightness in my chest, arm and shoulder. I mentioned it to the plastic surgeon NP and she said we'll keep an eye on it. She said that it could still be scarring from the radiation. All the doctors keep saying, "radiation is the gift that keeps on giving." Well I wish it would stop. I've enjoyed the gift long enough and now I'd like to return it. She said if there continues to be a problem we could always do a revision. I didn't ask exactly what that meant but my guess is they'd have to go back in and replace the implant and I don't know what else. Can they put an expander back in and try to stretch my skin? No, actually, they can't because that had to be done before radiation. The damage has been done, there's no more stretching happening. Dang it. Then I don't know exactly what a revision entails. Regardless she said we'll watch it and see what happens. In the meantime she gave me a referral to see a physical therapist who specializes in mastectomy patients and she told me she wants me to do some massaging. So I've been stretching and rubbing/massaging under my arm and on my chest. If I put my right arm straight out my thumb and hand starts to tingle like there's a lack of circulation. So that's fun. The physical therapist wasn't available for about three weeks so I'm going to finally be seeing him next week. Hopefully, he has some tricks up his sleeve to help this problem. I'm getting lopsided again and I'd really prefer not to be. ;-)

I also saw my oncologist about a week ago. Before my appointment they drew my blood. He asked me how things were going and I told him my life update of everything going great. I'm being followed by my plastic surgeon, the breast cancer surgeon and the radiation oncologist. He was like, "Well it sounds like you're in pretty good hands. I don't know why you need to come see me." He said we could follow up in one year......IF, a certain blood test comes back negative. 

So he starts telling me about this new blood test. It's a ctDNA test. There's a company that has been working on this screening test for about 20 years. Every couple of years they come out and say, hey we have new data on our screening, but it's not FDA approved yet. Finally, this past year it was approved for colon cancer. But then last month the company said they will run the test for free for breast cancer until it's FDA approved. That was a long backstory to hear about the actual test. 

What they've done is: they take your tumor DNA and make a template from it. They draw your blood to see if there is any DNA that matches the cancerous tumor DNA. If the test comes back negative then that's great. If it comes back positive they'll get another test about a month later to see what the numbers are doing. Each month they'll draw blood to see if the numbers are going up. If they are, then there's a good chance there are still cancer cells floating around in your body and further testing is needed. I was like wow this sounds awesome, pull up the results. He said the first test takes 6-8 weeks to get the results back. They have to get my tumor and pull out the DNA and make a template. Then they can check my blood against that template. So I'm waiting for those results for another month or so. But that is a really cool test. It's like finding the cancer before it has a chance to spread everywhere.