BENIGN

Photo copyright Aji, 2021; all rights reserved.

All right, this can't wait.  

The imaging people just uploaded my results to my patient portal, and their best guess (because it's mostly always a best guess) is BENIGN!

The size of the boulder that just rolled off my chest . . . .  I guess the little messenger spirit above who visited me this morning was bringing GOOD news for once.

Now, as my wording above makes clear, it's not a done deal. It could change, especially if spread continues. Even without that, they want me to have the reimaging done in 11 months instead of two years. The other oddity is they cannot figure out what it is, but I have some ideas about that.

My research turned up a rare form of mastitis that is neither infectious (which is why the antibiotics did exactly nothing except tear up my stomach) nor malignant (which is why it's not showing up in the lymph, only the dermal tissue).  It's called idiopathic granulomatous mastitis, or IGM for short, and they don't know why it develops in certain women, and I am not actually a member of the populations where it does tend to occur (i.e., premenopausal and childbearing/lactating).

But . . . it is apparently an inflammatory condition. Now, gee, what's happened to me lately that is likely to have jacked my inflammatory response into overdrive?

YUP.

Now, I got both doses of the COVID-19 vaccine in my LEFT arm, and this has all occurred [so far] only on my right side. I always get vaccines ONLY in my left, because I'm right-handed, and with all the work around here, I can't afford to be without full use of my dominant hand/arm. But maybe that worked against me here in a different way. My autoimmune problems are largely, but not entirely, inflammation-driven, and even though I had almost no lymph swelling after the vax (and none on the right side at all), it's a whole new virus. Hell, it's even in the name: novel coronavirus. So my speculation is that because I'm already predisposed to heightened inflammatory responses courtesy of my autoimmune diseases, maybe my body reacted to the coronavirus vaccine with the kind of severe lymph-node agitation that was sufficient to produce IGM. And IGM mimics inflammatory breast cancer so well that it's hard to rule out either one in testing.

Also, the treatment for IGM? Not much, actually, because as with most idiopathic conditions, there's too much they don't know about it. But the one standard treatment for it? Prednisone. Which I'm already taking intermittently for my breathing issues. So maybe I can reverse this just by a short course of bumping up my steroid intake.

Maybe not. I mean, we all know that none of these is definitive, and I now have to watch myself like a hawk for any progression. And I will still have to do all this all over again in 11 months to know for sure. [I will probably also need to keep my appointment with the surgeon In July anyway, but we'll see.]

But for now? I'm no longer thinking about having to get my shit together because my life expectancy is less than five years, or less than two. Yeah, there's still all the physical pain and discomfort, but if they can [mostly] rule out anything terminal, I can [mostly] ignore it, or at least work around it. And maybe I can even reverse it.

So thank you, all of you, who've been sending good thoughts and prayers and whatever else for the last few weeks. I've got some wrap-up stuff to take care of, probably with the surgeon and definitely with my own doctor, so there'll be some time and expense involved yet. But mentally? I can get back to work.

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.