Today was the first day of my treatment. I had to have the scintigraphie pre operation procedure. It was hard to leave my house, it felt like I was really making my first step onto the possibly long road of treatment. Hard not to dive under the covers and stay home.
Miss Texas kindly delivered me the 10 or so km to the Centre de Médecine Nucléaire where I was immediately taken in hand and led to the treament room. After taking off my top, (yes back into that again), I had to lie on a platform. There were quite a few people in the room and in the control room next door so it was a bit busy but at least I wasn't standing around doing nothing. Actually I was a bit embarrassed as there was quite a cute young guy in the control room next door and I thought 'oh no, he's gonna see me' but once I was lying on the bed, nobody in the control room could see me which felt nicer.
Tears started coming out of my eyes and one of the assistants saw me and asked me if I was ok. I said I was stressed, he nicely reassured me and told the doctor I was stressed who, in turn, also reassured me. He told me he was going to put a needle in my breast right next to my nipple and, as the receptionist said, hardly hurt. The second needle did hurt more and it made me flinch quite hard. However, it was all over quite quickly and hup I was injected with radioactive material.
The weird part comes next - another guy then put gauze on the needle entry points and started to massage my breast. Errrrrrrrr??? Massage? Is this a spa I had come to by mistake? It needed to be done so that the material would move along the lymph nodes and reach the sentinel lymph node that they are going to remove tomorrow. They then left me for 5 minutes to massage my breasts myself. Another young guy (told you there were loads of them in the room) said the harder I massage, the quicker the material will move and the sooner I can go home. I looked at him in the eye and said, 'yeah but this is kinda weird isn't it, this massaging my breast?' He looked at me with a slight smile - he thought it was weird too!
After 5 mins they all came back and rolled my platform in a tube that took pictures like a scan I guess. Ah, no picture, more massaging needs doing. So there I was on my back rubbing my breast like a crazy woman for another 5 minutes whilst the party was going on in the control room next door. Weird.
And we had lift off. Back into the tube thing and the photos were taken, my lymph nodes came on the screen and a guy with a special pen came and marked on my skin where the lymph node is so tomorrrow the surgeon can quickly get to it without cutting me up too much. I believe they also inject some blue dye during the operation so the node is also dyed blue and very visible. Apparently they are very hard to get at.
After a short wait with a few really old peoople in the waiting room (always nice to be the youngest patient even in a nuclear medicine centre), the doctor called me, told me they'd managed to locate the correct node and wished me all the very best for the operation tomorrow.
All in all a pretty good experience for a test I was absolutely dreading. The receptionist kinda spoilt it by saying 'see it's nothing isn't it? Nothing compared to tomorrow anyway'. Miss Texas was almsot ready to dive across the counter and throttle her however a hard look from her sufficed to stop the silly girl's platitudes. She could see that I was feeling tired and that it had been hard nonetheless.
A little stop to find open at the front pjs in Monoprix (ended up with a long nightie which makes me look like a Tunisian grandmother) and home it was.
Thanks to MT who has had all the bum gigs so far in this nightmare and has withstood them like a true friend.
Overwhelmed by all the calls and texts today and tonight wishing me all the best. Sad to hear my Mum cry when she said I love you and speak to you tomorrow. Yeah, I cried too Mum.
à demain.
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