The Sonogram & Mammogram

My sonogram was done by a wonderful young lady named Erica. She was warm, fun and caring. She did the sonogram with a younger trainee, who was left in the room with me while Erica got everything set up. Bless her heart, the trainee told me all sorts of horror stories about sonograms and what showed up on them. I'm thinking, "this girl is going to have to work on her bedside stories to make it in medicine."

Erica does the sonogram, over and over and over and over. She tells me that she is going to go get the radiologist to look at the sonogram picture, that this was standard procedure. That's when the first "ping" went off in my head. He comes into the dark room and runs the wand himself over the mass in my right breast, over and over and over. He leaves. He comes back and tells me that we need to do another mammogram to compare to the 5-2-06 one that I had done in Rockwall. He tells me that there are 2 masses there, not just one.

I walk with Erica to the mammogram room and the lady starts the torture, especially on the right breast, which was already tender just from the sonogram wand. She does the standard pictures, then leaves the room. She comes back and says that we need more pictures. Great. Worse torture. She leaves the room again. For a long time. The radiologist comes into the room and tells me that I need to have a needle core biopsy TOMORROW to see what we're dealing with to see if it is cancerous or not. Ping.

When I got home and told David what happened and what was scheduled, he said, "that's it, whatever you're doing from now on, I'm going with you." We talked and I cried, scared for the first time.