I’m going to include my journal entry here, to preserve the history of this procedure in my life.  I wish I had a journal entry from my Grandma Ruby, who died of breast cancer in 1959.  I’ve felt her near me as I’ve gone through this.  Here’s what happened yesterday:

Thursday 12 January 2023
9:32 a.m. It’s over and it all went well. Now we wait for the lab results to see if they got clean margins. It should only take a few days. I’ll recap yesterday here.
We got to the AF hospital at 9:30 and went upstairs to the surgical center. It’s a beautiful hospital. The waiting room had floor to ceiling glass windows looking west over the valley and north to the AF Temple. I filled out some paperwork (most I did before online), they weighed and measured me, and soon I was taken back to a pre-op room to change out of my clothes and into a paper gown and paper boxer shorts. The gown was inflatable with a hose and warm air. We were told my surgery was scheduled for 1:00 p.m. That seemed like a long wait. We had our phones and John brought a pile of mail to read.
Then we remembered they’d told me I’d need blood drawn and another mammogram to insert the radioactive chip before surgery, so eventually I was put in a wheel chair and rolled through the behind-the-doors maze of the hospital to the imaging center on another floor. They took me into the mammogram room where 2 young techs got things ready for me. They were in and out of the room, getting the machine set for my procedure.
While I was in that room (and they were out of it), my mind turned to Grandma Ruby Smuin, who died of breast cancer weeks after I was born. She prepared her Funeral Program book a few years before she died, knowing the cancer would take her. I thought about what health care must have been like in 1959 and wondered how they treated hers. Did she have surgery? Chemo? Radiation? I just don’t know. I do know that she suffered for 6.5 years before the cancer spread in her body the last 6 months.
I started to weep and was glad the girls were helping someone else in another room. I felt Ruby near, watching over me, rejoicing at the equipment and people here who would save me from her fate. Tears fell down my cheeks. And they are falling now as I think about it. What a gift I’ve been given, to live in these days and have all this help. Dear Ruby. She must have suffered so much. I imagined her hovering over my doctor, guiding her hand. I felt her love and concern and felt her Presence. I’ve never felt her before, but I did yesterday.
When the girls returned with the doctor, they smashed my breast in the mammogram machine vertically first. I was sitting in a chair. The doctor cleaned then deadened the skin on the side of my breast before inserting a long needle that had placement marks on it so he could measure how far in to slide it. He’d studied the image on the screen first, then made adjustments, checking the screen until he was confident it was placed right by the small tumor (still hard for them to find). Then he inserted the radio-active seed that would guide Dr Tittensor to the tumor during surgery. There was no pain after the prick. I asked if I could watch and they said “if you want to, most look away.” I watched. They kept asking me if I felt woosy. I said, “no, I’m the one who watches youtube videos of surgeries.” Then they did another smash, horizontally, to make sure the chip was in the right place. It was. Then they rolled me back to my waiting room and my warm air hook up. John waited with me.
Eventually the anesthetist came in to explain to me what he would be doing to put me to sleep. At 1:00 Dr Tittensor came in to talk to us. She was wearing a cap and mask and scrubs. She was good at explaining exactly what she’d do. Everyone we’ve talked to before and in the hospital today sang her praises. They tell us she is the leading breast surgeon, probably in all the western states. They say people come from all over to have her help them. They all LOVE her. After her visit, she gave the attending nurses the thumbs up–I was ready to be rolled back. The anesthetist came in and said he was going to start dripping something to relax me. I remember the ride to the operating room and maybe a minute or two of being in that room, but that was all. There were lots of machines and overhead lights in the room.
The next thing I remember was waking up at 3:50 in the waiting room where I started hours before. They’d told us the surgery would last 1.5 hours, then post op and recovery. I’d been in post op for about 30 min before waking up. I was wearing a pink bra stuffed with gauze. John was there.
John said Dr Tittensor came out to the waiting room after the surgery to tell him all went very well. They removed the 2 centennial lymph nodes (the 2 closest to the tumor) and did lab work on them there in the operating room. Both were clean, so there was no need to take more. That’s great. She removed the tumor. I asked her before surgery what the tumors look like–can they see a difference in the tissue? She said they are usually white and hard. She said they are ugly. She cut mine out, removing the biopsy chip and the seed put in earlier. She felt they got good margins. [I learned later that she had to take 3 scoops to get those clean margins, there was a tentacle of cancer crossing the first margin.] Now the tissue will be sent to a lab to be thoroughly checked to be sure the margins are clean. I’ll get the lab results in a phone call from her in a few days. If the margins are clean, I will be declared Cancer Free. So we wait now for that news.

I’ve learned these last few weeks how many friends I have who have not had a recent mammogram.  I encourage everyone not to let that slide!  I’m safe today because my tumor was found early in a routine mammogram.  Please be diligent.  This may help: