It's a rum thing that in 11 days since I last blogged, I am not really any further forward than I was before, except a huge amount has happened.
At the time of last writing, I had just had three more biopsies and I was waiting for results, with some positivity but a sense that at least one of the biopsies would come out as problematic.
I called my nurse specialist the day after blogging, to see if I could piece together a scheme of how things might pan out. I focussed on surgery as coming before any possible chemo, and we looked at my living conditions, which are odd to say the least - single, remote rural location, with a major issue in having contaminated spring water supplying my home, not clean mains water - and how to arrange care, travel, nursing and so on.
The conversation set me off on a trail that lasted a couple of days of phoning round social services, private healthcare companies, Macmillan Helpline, and my GP.
At the same time, I took a couple of important decisions, and I got my hair cut. It was half-way down my back but unwieldy and really too much to wash post op, and a nightmare to deal with if I were to have chemo. So I suddenly returned to the haircuts of my youth, with an asymetric bob that I loved instantly and took no time to get used to at all. The plait of my long hair is ready as a donation to a wig makers, as a kind of insurance gift in case I need a wig myself in due course. Apparently it takes 15 plaits to make one wig so there was no point in holding out to make one off my single plait!
In efforts to cover all the bases as early as possible, I actually popped in to see my GP on 17 Nov to discuss any other symptoms of anything I might be having that I might have been overlooking and pretending were fine but weren't. We couldn't really come up with anything, which was a good thing, but we thought specimens and a full rack of blood samples might be handy so I provided all that over the following days. The chat with the local phlebotomy nurse was priceless in itself, reassuring and we chucked in some extra bloods, like cholesterol, just because I had taken the precaution to starve myself. This proved very useful because yesterday the GP called to say, er, actually my cholesterol was up a notch to uncomfortable levels for them (at 6, not my old 4, with the preferred average of 5.2) but that, in my current circumstances, scrub the full-on dieting and wait until after any breast operation to start the intensively healthy, squeeky clean living.
In the middle of all this, naturally, my cat showed signs she might be on the point of yielding up the ghost, so we went to the veterinary hospital to arrange for her to go through the great cat flap in the sky in a nice, comfortable way. Instantly, as usual, the cat decided she wasn't quite as bad as she had shown signs of, so she was given a reprieve, and steroids. This has meant she has been eating me out of house and home, but I adore her and it's great fun to have her still around. We're a bit of a double act at times.
