The experience of having a lumpectomy for the breast cancer was scary but necessary, and honestly I was looking forward it. I was looking forward that foreign mass being out of my body. A wonderful thing about the Mayo Clinic is they actually only took the lymph nodes that they needed and, prior days when people were dealing with breast cancer they would take out all of the lymph nodes to figure out whether or not cancer had spread.
Mayo Clinic was able to pinpoint the exact lymph nodes they needed to take out in order to determine if cancer had spread to any other part of my body. What they did during that lumpectomy is, they actually examined the lymph nodes and then they froze sections of the lymph nodes, sort of as a double check to make sure that they were looking at them unfrozen and then they were looking at the frozen lymph nodes to make sure cancer hadn’t spread to any other parts of my body.
And after the lumpectomy, it was wonderful to be able to get the news that on first glance, it appeared that cancer had not spread to any other part of my body. And so, two weeks later, after, you know, the lymph nodes had been cultured or whatever the correct medical term is, they re-examined the lymph nodes and was able to tell me, by phone, in order to ease my fears, that cancer hadn’t spread to any other parts of my body.