Worst. 24 Hours. Ever.

Hi there. I survived my surgery. Everything went fine. I was in the hospital for three days, two of which I was on a constant morphine drip with one of those self-administration buttons. It was sweet except for the incessant feeling that my skin was crawling. Apparently one of the very common side effects of morphine is that it makes you itch like a sonofabitch. And no amount of good lotion or scratching helps the situation. But when having to make a choice between severe abdominal pain and some itching, I choose itching.
The hospital staff were nice enough. I was on a liquid diet for 2.5 days, so by the time I was able to eat "real" food (if you can call hospital food that), I wasn't even hungry for it. Mom brought the Geej up to see me every day, and it was pure hell not being able to hold her. But it was great to see her. Mostly I dozed and listened to my iPod (while dozing).
Got home Monday morning, and was just sore as hell. Not only my guts, but my lower back. I guess from all the lying flat on it or perhaps I'm using those muscles in new and unusual ways, so I ache. And I can't really help out with the baby, so my poor mother is having to take care of me and the Geej (who developed some sort of a cold and is coughing like she smokes 2 packs a day). Everything was going well and then...

Yesterday afternoon, I got a call from my doctor. The pathology report had come back on all of the stuff I'd had removed. And that thing they thought was a fibroid in my uterus? It wasn't. It was cancer. Leiomyosarcoma to be exact. Scary, rare and aggressive. Had they known it was a tumor, the recommended course of treatment would've been to have my uterus removed, so at least that had been done. But now we needed to find out it this shit had spread. It travels throughout the bloodstream, and attacks nearby organs. I've known this thing was there since it showed up on a sonogram in early January. So it had been sitting in me for at least 6 months, and no telling where else it had decided to travel. My doctor had wanted to do this surgery in February, but I couldn't because I wasn't sure at that time when I'd be called to go back to Russia and get The Geej. So I opted to wait, not knowing that I had a tumor growing inside me.

My doctor informed me that Wednesday morning (today) I would have a chest, abdomen and pelvic CT scan and that Thursday morning I'd be meeting with the gynecological oncologist. To say I was freaking out does not even skim the surface of what I was feeling when I got this news. Terrified. Shocked. Angry. Those words hint at what I was feeling, but truthfully, I cannot describe all that was going through my head. My mother had cancer (and beat it). My father had cancer, and it killed him within 6 weeks of his diagnosis. This is a disease I'm far more familiar with than I'd like to be. And now that I have a baby who depends on me for everything, I can't afford to have a cold, much less something shitty like fucking cancer.

So I got up this morning and went to have the scan done. Drank the nasty barium stuff. Had the contrast IV. All of it. And then I spent the rest of the day waiting to hear what the scan showed.

At about 4:30 today, my doctor called. The scans were clear. Meaning, as far as they can tell, the cancer hadn't spread, and they got it all when they performed my hysterectomy. Thank you Jesus, Buddha, Allah and Great Spirit. Mom and I split a bottle of champagne tonight to celebrate. Tomorrow I go meet with the oncologist to get more information and to see how we're going to deal with this going forward. What I predict is that they'll probably send me for an MRI just to confirm what the CT scans showed, and then I'll probably have to do scans a couple of times a year for the rest of my life to make sure it doesn't pop up somewhere new.

Right now, all I can feel is an enormous sense of relief. And this aching in my lower back and guts...