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| Photo copyright Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. |
Well.
This has been a day, but in the best way. Not everything is good news, of course, but the most important part of it definitely is.
Finally, I'm coming out of the fog.
Yesterday, I got a call from my doctor's office; on a day when she had been double-booked all day, they'd had multiple cancellations, and they wanted to know whether I wanted to move up my appointment from July 21st. YES! They scheduled me for a telemedicine appointment, but then several hours later someone else called me back and wanted to know if I could come in in person.
Of course. But that worried Wings a bit that it might be bad news, because I'd e-mailed my images and reports to her, trying to find out whether the thing they didn't address in any of the reporting was an issue — i.e., whether they had read them for, or could tell if I have, inflammatory breast cancer. I wrote here earlier about how drastically that differs from other types of breast cancer, and none of the imaging people addressed it at all in the reports, even though that was the reason I was there.
My doctor said, straight out, that she can state absolutely and unequivocally that I do not have inflammatory breast cancer. She can rule out any other kind of breast cancer, too. Yes, it's really, completely benign.
For that.
Now the issue becomes: What the hell IS it?
My doctor is convinced that we're right back to where we've always been where I'm concerned: that this is something autoimmune. On that front, the options range from "irritating but not requiring much different from me" to "spectacularly ugly and awful," but it's NOT like IBC in that I don't run a risk of a Stage 4 DX that would see me dead in under two years. This is familiar ground for me, and as problematic as this might yet be, I've been living with autoimmune disease my entire life, and I can deal with it, whatever it may be, now.
So here's what we're looking at: She says this is absolutely none of the usual forms of mastitis, i.e., carcinomic (cancerous), infectious, or even idiopathic granulomatous (IGM). She was irritated with the practitioners who kept trying to brush me off and force me into the "infectious "mastitis" category, too, because it's so clearly not that.
However . . . a quick Google once you know which search terms to use turns up multiple forms of autoimmune mastitis, including a lupus variant. It could be that. it could also be scleroderma, which has the potential to be absolutely horrific, but again, there are multiple variants, and they're not all what that god-awful exploitative Lifetime/CBS/whatever movie 20-some years ago made it out to be. Oh, and autoimmune explains the absolutely blinding fatigue I've had with this, and the pain, as well. She also thinks the thyroid thing is related: If you remember, a little over two years ago, I underwent multiple biopsies and was told I had either medullary or Hürthle-cell thyroid cancer (both nasty, with bad life expectancies), only to have them retract it entirely four months later. My doc thinks whatever this autoimmune thing is is something that, in me, at least, is presenting like cancer but is not.
And then there are all the other autoimmune things that could be causing something that doesn't fall into that category, and yes, it could be the inflammatory response from the COVID-19 vaccine three months ago that set all this in motion. In her words, "it could be something that doesn't even have a name, and you might be the first patient diagnosed with it to GIVE it a name."
So the next three weeks get expensive. Today was ~$150 for various things; tomorrow, I go in for a blood draw for a whole array of autoimmune labs, and they are HIDEOUSLY expensive. We're talking several hundred dollars here, at the very minimum. I go back in the 21st for the punch biopsy, but my doc's going to do that rather than paying through the nose for the imaging people in Santa Fe to do it. I suppose you could say it's to rule out IBC once and for all, but actually it's to check the dermal cells. Biopsies check for more than just cancer; there's a lot they can tell from changed or irregular cells that have to do with other diseases and conditions, too. However, that will also cost, and the path analysis will be even costlier. Meanwhile, I have to pay vehicle insurance and [advance, 2021] second-quarter taxes next week, too. So we really need to make some sales to cover all of this.
Yes, it's good news; no, it's not all good, but it's all manageable now. Well, except for the cost; I'm still going to need to raise enough to cover this, and there are already new scrips to buy and there may be more of those to come. Oh, and I WILL have to have the imaging repeated in 11 months — next May, actually — just to make sure that what's not showing now is STILL not showing then. Because unfortunately, this does put me at heightened risk.
To that end, links are here:
- Sales here;
- Testimonials here;
- Amazon wishlist here (priorities are all the mosquito-prevention items, especially the portables and the patio-surface ones, because Wings can take them around the land with his as he works);
- Patreon here;
- Ko-fi here
- Plain old PayPal here.
And if you've been contemplating a purchase? This would be a very, very good time to do it; I've got to make up this staggering outlay somehow. There's lots of fabulous new work with more to come, so please share all of the links.
For now, thank you to everybody who sent good vibes and messages of support, laid down tobacco and sent up prayers, and everything else. I am profoundly grateful for every single thing, and grateful that I will not need them for what was very much a worst-case scenario going forward.
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
