Had my pre-op with Dr. Friedman yesterday.

Naturally, my first question was whether I could  bring my laptop/iPhone to the hospital with me. (Yes – as long as Tom is watching it while I’m in surgery/recovery.)

He and a nurse-practitioner examined me. He seemed cheerful and optimistic about the surgery. He remains confident that he’ll be able to do the whole procedure via laparascopy. I hope he will, too, for a number of reasons:

  1. Much quicker recovery time (1 night in hospital v. 3 or 4).
  2. It means they didn’t find anything so dire that they had to open me up.
  3. I’ll be able to join Tom in taking Ben to college the first weekend in August. (If he has to go with a laparotomy, or traditional incision, it will be too soon for me to fly.)

On the other hand, waking up with an incision won’t necessarily be all bad news; it could simply mean that he (sorry to be graphic here, but you ARE reading a blog about there being cancer in my uterus) couldn’t fit everything out through the vagina.

In either case, we won’t really know too much about my staging until the pathology is back post-surgery. And that could take anywhere from two days to two weeks, depending on how fast the pathologist can read the results.

The bottom line, from his point of view: because I wasn’t presenting with traditional symptoms of uterine cancer (abnormal menstrual bleeding, or bleeding between periods), the likelihood is that things have been caught quite early and may well be contained to the uterus. That and $4 will get me a latte, of course, but I’m happy that he’s happy.

Tom will send out an email update once I’m out of surgery, and if I remember to install the WordPress app on my iPhone, I’ll try to update the blog once I’m out of recovery.