Suffering through every door

Yesterday I went to see my oncologist.  I haven't really been overly stressed about things until now.  I made it clear to her that I want ONLY interventions that will improve quality of life and lessen suffering, not for prolonging life.  I told her I was steering towards no treatment but to have monitoring to follow the progression of the disease.  She told me that left untreated, the tumor in my breast would grow through to the outside of my body leaving an open gaping wound that would not heal and that could go on for years before it reached the metastasizing stage.  She recommended I have the tumor surgically removed and undergo radiation for quality of life.  She also added that the surgery may not be possible or it may be complicated since the anatomy of that area is different now because of the previous surgery.  Tomorrow I will talk to the surgeon and get more information.

I can officially say now that I'm terrified.  I don't have short term disability this time.  A surgery will put me out of work at least 6 weeks.  I found out my previous surgeon removed almost all my lymph nodes on my right side.  That significantly increases my chances of dealing with lymphedema while doing radiation.  I cannot tolerate chemo or the estrogen blocking pill.  That means I will still only be doing partial treatment and my cancer will not be totally eliminated.

This cancer will kill me. Now I am faced with how it will kill me.  Will I suffer with an open gaping wound in my chest that will never heal and wait for it to spread to the rest of my body or will I go through major surgery and radiation and still maybe have another occurrence, along with the high probability of having lymph fill an arm and/or leg making it 4 times the size with no way to control it and chronic bone pain caused by radiation?  It's like telling me I can choose to pick between death of a thousand cuts or taking a long bath in a pool of nuclear waste.

So yeah, I feel a bit panicky now and going to have a very intense conversation with my surgeon tomorrow to try to get her on the same page as me before she just blindly goes in with her "usual treatment".  I'm not the usual patient and I am not ok with suffering for years and years just to maintain a beating heart.  I don't even know at this point if I will be physically able to continue working after this surgery.  My body is so broken down after the last treatments that I am barely hanging on and things are only getting worse.  I told my doc about all the other stuff going on with me and she wants to do an MRI of my brain and a PET scan of my entire body.  It's not scheduled yet because we are waiting on insurance to approve it first.  She did take a bunch of blood though so maybe that will say something.  My memory is getting so scary that when I walked in the frong doors of the doctor's office I didn't recognize it and stepped back out, confused and wondering where the office was, thinking I stepped into the wrong one.

I'm fucking scared.