Just to be clear…the subject of this post should be a sad trombone sound…similar to this. I googled how to spell this sound for a good 15 minutes. I even texted my grammar/spelling fanatic friends for advice. I clearly need to get out of the house sometime soon, yes?

Anyway, back to the sad trombone sound. It was kind of a cruddy day.

Yesterday, I started having some trouble with the dressing on my drain wounds. I won’t go into too much detail, but it is not covered like it should be anymore which means I cannot take a real shower until we get down to MD Anderson on Thursday. Just sponge bathing. Sponge bathing makes hair washing a problem.

I refrained from taking pain meds this morning so I could go see my dear friend, Katherine. Katherine, as most of you know, pretty much does the hair for all of Edmond. She’s fantastic. I was desperate to get my hair washed, so I texted her late last night. If she washed it in one of the salon sinks where I just lean back, then dried it for me, I’d be golden. She graciously got up at the crack of dawn to meet me. (Thank you, Katherine! I feel much more human.)

So that wasn’t the bad part. The bad part came when my surgeon, Dr. Gainer, called me while I was there. She was asking me about my ER trip and how things were going. But, what she really called for was to see what time I was flying in on Wednesday. She was hoping to schedule me with a radiation oncologist. After talking about my flights with her for a few minutes, it finally dawned on me … she is referring me to the radiation oncologist. This can’t be good.

I asked her if this meant I would have to have radiation after all. Her response was that I should wait to get the the radiation oncologist’s opinion about it, but that she was looking at my pathology report and the tumor was larger than they thought. While the MRI and ultrasound showed it to be about 2.5 cm, it wound up be 5.8 cm. This puts me in radiation territory.

So, that really stinks.

Really.

It complicates the reconstruction process, and it definitely lengthens the treatment time. I knew it would be awhile before I’m done with this mess, but I feel like that just added so much more time to the end of it.

After fighting furiously with United Airlines, I was able to get our flights changed so we could make the appointment with the radiation oncologist tomorrow. (Side note: United Airlines did not even come CLOSE to showing the caring and compassion I saw from American Airlines. Boo on them.)

So after I had a mini-meltdown about this news and fought with United … I calmed down and came to this conclusion:

There are gonna be steps backwards in this process. But, I have had so many blessings throughout this whole process, and I will continue to focus on those blessings — because each time one of those blessings shows itself, that is a step forward. So when I have a step backward – even if it is a big one, like this – I’m still ahead. 🙂