I Am Relieved--or I Think I Am

We met with Dr. Nieves at the Cancer Institute the following week. At first I was a bit uncomfortable with this doctor; even with my Puerto Rican background, I do not speak Spanish and I had a difficult time understanding everything he was saying. My mother on the other hand was fluent in Spanish as an adolescent.  She communicated with the doctor easily and they even bonded over their mutual passion for photography.  The appointment lasted nearly 4 hours.  Let me tell you—it was a lot of information.  One quality I praise this doctor for the most who performed my second surgery is that he was so thorough and meticulous—a characteristic you want in a doctor, especially one about to perform surgery.  We learned what type of ovarian cancer was found in the pathology reports—dysgerminoma, a germ cell type of tumor.  It is a very rare type of ovarian cancer even amongst adolescents—dysgerminomas account for less than 1% of ovarian tumors overall.  The oncologist said there was no need to fret yet—there was only a 10-30% chance the cancer cells had spread to my lymph nodes or anywhere else in my body.  Dr. Nieves was leaning more towards 10%, since my surgeon who removed the tumor “looked around” my abdominal cavity and he saw nothing suspicious.  Nonetheless, a laparoscopic procedure would be required to take samples of my lymph nodes and look around for any more cancerous cells.  I was told the surgery would be minimally invasive and I possibly would be able to go home the same day if all went well.

I was optimistic about this next operation.  My mother and I drove back down to South Jersey in high spirits; after meeting with Dr. Nieves, I wasn’t very concerned with having cancer.  If anything, I had convinced myself already that nothing else would be found.  I would have to simply deal with having two more miniscule incisions on either side of my larger, Caesarian-section-looking incision.  These marks would all be low on my abdomen and I knew they wouldn’t bother me too much.  My only cause for anxiety was not being able to schedule the surgery right away due to lack of availability of an operating room for such a procedure.  I was kind of on edge the next few days; not being able to tell my boss when I would be back to work was not what I had planned.  I had already been out of work a week and a half at this point and knew my vacation days were just about used up.

At this point, 9 days after the first surgery, I was feeling much better.  Though it was becoming the end of the second week out of work and I still had no date for the second surgery.  I didn’t want another weekend to go by without calling my boss—but what should I say?  I wasn’t sure how to properly handle this situation.  Should I go back to work for a few days?  Or would that be unwise to go back for a few days, only to leave all of a sudden if I got the phone call to clear my schedule for surgery?