Hello again! I know I said I wanted to post more, and that really hasn’t happened. I’m not going to apologize. I’m trying really hard to find a balance between life, my Scentsy business, blogging, cleaning, relaxing….EVERYTHING! I finally bought a planner to try to organize my tasks for everything and make myself make time for each thing. I’m slowly working on it…
I saw From Mrs. to Mama’s post today, and thought this would be a great opportunity to get a post in. So, here it goes…what’s been on my mind lately.
This past Friday was a somewhat scary day. Forgive the crudeness here, but I have been having irritation in my one armpit (that’s the crudeness…no other way to best describe that area though) off an on for about a month now. I couldn’t see anything there, so I was just attributing it to skin irritation from shaving. I had to buy a new brand/kind of razor around when this all started, so I thought maybe I just nicked myself, or was having sensitive skin issues from this new razor. Well, on Thursday, it started to feel the worst it’s felt since it started. I told Hubby about it and he said he would check it out for me if I wanted. Well, that night was busy, I didn’t have him check it out, and Friday morning I woke up with it feeling even worse. I asked him to check it out that morning, and when he felt around the sore area (which was so tender!), he said he felt a hard lump where I was hurting. My first thought was, “oh, I have some sort of cyst…no big deal, probably just needs antibiotics or something”. Hubby’s thoughts went in a different direction…a direction that had crossed my mind, but didn’t really sink in. I was trying to think positive, minor. If you don’t already know this, you have lymph nodes in that area of your body. Then it hit me. I have two aunts that were both diagnosed with breast cancer in the past year, and another person very dear to my heart and family who has battled cancer twice now in the last 3 years, first time being breast cancer that also came with tumors in her lymph node area. I kept trying to tell myself that this had to just be some sort of infection or something, but truth be told, I was worried. Worried enough, either way, that I made a call to the family doctor that morning and got myself an appointment for that afternoon. If it was just an infection, it needed treatment now. I could hardly move my arm without pain! IF it was something more serious, we had to find out…
Appointment time rolled around, and we all headed to the doctor. You better believe I wanted Hubby along just in case I got bad news, just in case there would be painful tests done, I needed support. I was so nervous and anxious the whole morning, I broke down and cried at one point, and as we were driving there, I started to feel sick to my stomach from it all. I was thinking about the dear family friend and what she has been through. I was thinking about all the what if’s. I was nervous about what might happen in the doctor’s office that day (would needles be involved, would he biopsy, would he tell me things I didn’t want to hear?). We finally get there, I fill out the paperwork I need to fill out, and we wait. And wait. He’s a good doctor, but there’s always a wait. Luckily I had a toddler along to distract me a little bit during our wait.
Finally at around 1:20/1:30pm (our appointment time was actually 12:45pm), the doctor comes into the room. I tell him what’s been going on, describe how it was feeling, and that we made the appointment right away because Hubby discovered the lump and we got worried. I was hoping for a more immediate answer of it just being a cyst, or maybe an infected lymph node. First thing he asks is if I have done a self breast exam in the last month, or ever for that matter. No. I have not. And also not the direction I was expecting him to go right away. That made me more worried about what it might be. Especially after informing him that I have a family history of breast cancer, among other cancers (skin and colon). So, after instructing me on how to perform one, he goes ahead and checks out the lump. Ouch! He then explains that it is definitely a lymph node. But apparently you have clusters of them in that area, and this particular one was pretty far towards my back for him to think it was related to the frontal area. He did know about the razor and what I thought the irritation was from. At that point, he said that he only ever had 1 case where the lymph node was sore and it turned out to be cancerous. Almost 100% of the time, the lumps are not sore. So, with the knowledge of the new razor, and the location of the VERY sore lump, he diagnosed it as just what I was hoping it was – an inflamed/infected lymph node, possibly from a cut from my razor that I didn’t know I had. He prescribed antibiotics and moist heat compresses and said I should start to feel better by Monday. If I was not feeling better by the end of the antibiotics and the lump was still there, then I have to call back and he will order photo imaging tests.
Well, it’s Monday. I have been taking the meds and (almost) diligently been applying moist heat compresses 3 times a day, as instructed. I will say that I do feel less pain today than I did on Friday, but it still is pretty sore, and I still feel that lump there. Even though the doctor told me not to lose sleep over it this past weekend, I’m still not “out of the woods”. I keep trying to tell myself that I have 3.5 days worth of antibiotics to take yet, so I can’t get too anxious until they’re done. But I would be lying if I said it’s not on my mind at least twice a day…
So, I’m waiting. Watching. Doing what I was told. And we’ll just have to see what it’s like on Friday when I’m done with the antibiotics. Hopefully it will be gone, and my worrying will have been for nothing. But for now, I wait.
And as a side note, I wasn’t really going to write this particular post until I was done with the medicine, knew for sure what was going on, etc. But after reading From Mrs. to Mama’s post today for this link up, about writing what’s on your mind, getting it out of your mind and on paper (or computer in this case!), I decided this would be the perfect time to make that time for me, for this post. If no one else reads it, I wrote it for me.
