You are the boss of your treatment plan

I met with the surgeon who performed my mastectomy on last Friday. It was a follow-up visit to make sure that my healing was progressing well and to see how I was reacting to the radiation treatment prior to my scheduled reconstruction. I liked my general surgeon -- he has a fun personality and is very knowledgeable about breast cancer and surgical procedures in that treatment.

We talked for a bit about how I was handling the consideration about removing my breast. I got teary in the midst of our conversation and I explained to him that my logic about losing my breast did not match up with some of the other people in my life whose opinions mattered to me. I mentioned to him that my mother felt that I should get rid of the breast just to reduce the chance that cancer could come back to that breast. He responded that as a parent, he would likely give his child the same advice -- but as a doctor, he knew that removing my breast was not going to zero out my odds of breast cancer happening again. Nor would it keep the cancer I had from recurring.

I said to him that I knew or rather I felt that I was being a big crybaby about all of this and I was really trying to keep it all together. And he looked at me and smiled and said... "If you're being a crybaby... after all that you've been through... then what in the world are the rest of us doing as we go through our lives?"  He told me that I had been through a very traumatic experience and it was okay to cry.

It is okay to cry.

That's something that I know. That's something that I tell my new pink-ribbon sisters when I talk to them. It is really okay to grieve and cry about your situation. But for some reason, I am fighting with myself on a daily basis to grieve over this process. I guess I'm fighting my own tears because I know that I've come a long way and I should be happy that its over. Or almost over. But I really feel like I just let go of a breath I've been holding for a year and now the tears are coming, the fears are surfacing and its difficult.

You are the boss of your treatment.

My surgeon told me that I am the boss of my treatment plan and progress. He reassured me that as long as I was hesitant about removing my breast, it was not the decision that I need to make. That comment made me feel a lot more comfortable about my desire to keep my breast. I will, most likely, have to see the doctor relatively frequently but I'd rather go every 3 months to be checked out than to wake up from surgery without my breast.

Let's hope that this boss is instinctively right.