First Reactions & Second Opinions

The day I got my diagnosis my oncologist had me come into the office.  After diagnosis, they do what is called a "staging workup."  Basically this is finding out what stage cancer you have.  The staging isn't as big a deal for Hodgkin's as it is for other cancers, but it still needs to be done.

The first thing my doctor did was a bone biopsy.  I got the diagnosis on the phone, my husband and I had our first big cry, and then we got in the car and went to the doctor's office.  This was good for me, I felt like we were doing something right away, starting to work on the cure right away.  It was also good for my husband, because he had lots of questions the doctor was able to answer.

Should you be inclined, you can get the full details of what a bone biopsy is here, but the short answer is they stick a needle through your skin directly into your pelvis bone in the general vicinity of your rear end, thereby making the procedure quite literally a huge pain in the butt.  In fact, the biopsy is so uncomfortable, they numb the area first via injection.  This allegedly helps, but it feels like they're just dividing one huge pain in the butt into five or six slightly smaller pains.

You have to lie on your stomach for the procedure.  This in itself was difficult for me, because I'd had surgery two days earlier to remove the swollen lymph node in my neck which they biopsied to make the diagnosis.  You start to know this is kind of a big deal when they bring in a nurse whose whole job is to hold your hand during the biopsy.

This isn't the normal nurse either.  It's not the average looking middle-aged woman who always tells you about her son's wedding.  This is the hot, twenty-three year old Latina nurse.  (What?  I have cancer, I'm not blind or dead.)  Since I was lying face down on the table with my head away from the door and my eyes shut, I didn't know they'd switched out the nurse until half way through the procedure.

The biopsy procedure was performed by my doctor and seemed to require a somewhat significant amount of physical exertion.  I didn't feel much once the local anesthesia kicked in, except when he aspirated the needle to pull out my bone marrow.  That hurt, but only for a second or two.  It was long enough for my breath to suck in and my eyes to fly open involuntarily.  It was then I saw they had switched in the hot nurse.  It helped.

The doctor actually showed me what he pulled out, which was sort of cool.  Mostly looked like blood, with little tan/white pieces of marrow floating in it.  Neat-o.  I wish they'd let me see the lymph node.

I'm taking my diagnosis seriously, I promise.  I understand cancer is a big deal, and not something to be made light of.  I listened intently to all my doctor said that day, about the rest of the staging process, and the details of the upcoming chemotherapy regimen I was soon to undergo.  However, during the entire process of the biopsy this 73 second clip was playing on repeat in the back of my mind.

They took that test tube off to biopsy it, to find out if the cancer had spread to my bones.  Fortunately, it has not.  The bone biopsy, painful as it was, was negative.

Furthermore, turns out the bone biopsy was not the biggest pain in the butt ever.

Getting my second opinion gets that honor.