"Pathology was great!"

As soon as she finished peeling the glue off my incisions and telling me my options about scar management, Dr. Singh said "Pathology was great!" 

No cancer in any of the biopsies, no cancer in the rinse fluid. The tumor just barely got into the wall of the uterus (just 3 cm), much less than halfway through, it is Stage 1-A. I have no risk factors.  It is Grade 2 or possibly somewhere between Grade 2 and 3, so she wants to be conservative and have me go through a brief series of radiation treatments at Virginia Hospital Center. It is very specifically targeted toward the cells that would be most likely to still be harboring cancer, at the top of the vagina, they are incredibly precise in their radiation.  She does not recommend chemotherapy because the risks outweigh the benefits in my case.

She showed us color photos of my interior -- looks so shiny and clean in there, but there was a lot of icky infection sticking stuff together.  That is being tackled by the appropriate types of antibiotics -- the Infectious Disease doctor made a good guess on what types of bacteria were causing all that infection.

The hardest part, and this will come as no surprise to anyone, is that I am mandated to lose a significant amount of weight as part of my cancer treatment. Part of being a person with fat, no matter how happy and healthy, is that your fat produces extra estrogen and that can add to risk of more cancer, or a return.

In fact, we spent most of our time talking about how we think about weight loss, how every person has a different answer to the question of what works, and the challenge is to discover that answer.  Because I already respect her so much, I told her everything that scares me about trying to lose weight (it's really hard, it's easy to fail, it's a non-stop effort, all the usual). But I also said that if this is what comes out of this whole experience, that I am forced to find out how to be less fat, then this will all have been worth it.  I probably am not going to want to discuss this exact topic with the world on a regular basis, for all the obvious reasons, but she said I am the boss of what support I get, I am the boss of what systems I use and I will figure it out.  She said that she also needs people to support her about this, and she gets it. I am quite sure the gynecological oncologist did not plan to spend as much time on this topic with me, but she did.

In about five weeks we will start the radiation, after everything is fully healed inside.  I still have a couple more weeks of restrictions on my activities but after that I am allowed to return to the regular world, carefully. 

We will probably never know why there was an infection or why I didn't feel worse because of it.  It was a big nasty thing and she is mystified that there weren't more symptoms.  But, some mysteries are not solved and this infection probably helped me not to have a much more advanced stage of cancer before they found it.  My regular gynecologist, Dr. Bennett, gets a lot of credit for persisting in her quest since I was feeling mostly fine and it seemed like a GI problem.

My guardian angel used pus to get our attention and it worked.