12th Anniversary

It snowed today.  Much like the day 12 years ago when Jill and I were married.  It's been an amazing 12 years.  But today we had a lot to worry about, in addition to celebrate this happy event.

I worked from home so I could go with Jill to meet with the surgeon when they called us in.  It happened to be at 12:00 p.m. We called my parents to come watch the kids and we met with the doctor to schedule surgery for the next week.  Or so we thought.

The doctor had another plan.  This cancer trip has been filled with turns and crossroads that take us off of the pre-determined course.  The doctor told us that the lump which we had been told was 3 cm (just over an inch) is actually 3cm wide, but 6 cm long!  It's twice as big as we thought and the course of action for this isn't simply a lumpectomy rather we should seriously consider a mastectomy. Again we were taken off course and shocked to hear about this plan. The doctor spent a long time with us telling us things we hadn't known or thought of before.  In the end the recommendation isn't for surgery next week rather, to take an MRI and have gene testing to see if Jill has a "cancer gene". We are probably a couple weeks away from surgery.

We called Mom and Dad and asked them to keep watching our children for the rest of the day. They were so nice they put off their plans to take our kids not just the entire day, but also for the night too.  MRI's aren't the most comfortable x-ray's, so Jill took a valium to calm herself a bit and went in to find out exactly how big this lump is.

Each person we have talked to, it has been for the first time.  The only constant has been the "nurse navigator" who Jill called to get a bit of a second opinion.  We just want someone with amazing bedside manor to share with us what they think.  The nurse navigator was extremely nice and shared with Jill that she had just seen that the lump is bigger than expected too and called it a "game changer".

She went on to say mastectomies aren't the end of the world and  can be a very good option.  I remembered that a very good friend of mine reads MRI's for a living, and he happened to specialize in breast reconstruction.   I called Jonathan Shakespear and he spent 30 minutes confirming what we know and making us feel a lot better about this horrible new development that the lump is so large.  Jonathan even said he will call St. Marks hospital to find out what he can and find out who the best doctors are and make sure we are working with them.  I haven't talked to Jonathan for a number of years but he was so nice to take my call on a Friday night.

It was our anniversary, so after the hospital we rushed off to pick up some groceries for Logan's birthday dinner before joining Corwin and Judy Bunkall on our date.  An a cappella group from BYU was performing at Taylorsville High School.  It was nice to hear them, they were really good, but my mind was thinking about breast cancer.

My parents had our kids for a sleep over, which was so nice.  Everyone has been so nice throughout this ordeal.  So many people are praying for us and doing so many nice things and we really haven't even told most of the people we know.

One of the last things Jonathan Shakespear told me was "you've got a long road to hoe".  He confirmed that this is very treatable, however it's critical that this DCIS cancer isn't "invasive". If the cancer is invasive all rules are off and the treatment is much more intense.

We have so many decisions to make in the coming days ahead.  What do we do?  Until we get more information we can only pray.

It's been an amazing 12 years, and pretty great that we get to celebrate it. We only hope next year we get to celebrate it on a more happy note.