What's if it's just liver damage?

 I'm starting this blog at an early stage in our journey, but not at the beginning. My wife wants her personal information kept private, so I'm blogging this anonymously. My hope is that others supporting a partner with cancer will find some insight or peace in reading this blog -- even if it is just confirmation that somebody else shares their feelings.

While I intend to make a post filling in how we got here, here is the current state of things:

- Stage 1 breast cancer, HER2 negative, estrogen and progesterone positive 2 years ago

- Lump under the arm a month ago, biopsied and positive for metastatic breast cancer, this time HER2 negative, progesterone negative, estrogen positive.

- PET scan shows no liver involvement.

- MRI of the breasts happens to spot the liver, which has "innumerable lesions suspicious for metastases". 

- Follow-up MRI, just of the liver, definitive for cancer.

- Oncologist says it is liver cancer.

Yet my wife still turns to me, many times a day, and ask plaintively "but what if it's just liver damage"? "What if they read the MRIs wrong"?  "I feel too healthy, I know they got it wrong".

I never know what to say. I want her to have hope. I want her to fight this. But she's not ready to accept that she has metastatic cancer in the liver -- and when she talks about it, she talks about it as if "what if I don't have cancer at all". She knows she does in the lump under her arm, based on the biopsy, but she ignores that.

I just hold her, hug her, tell her I love her, and never answer the question. Because I know what the answer is -- it is what the oncologist said: metastatic breast cancer in the liver. But I also know that juries regularly find somebody guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt", only to be proven wrong later. So even this "beyond a reasonable doubt" diagnosis is not 100% certain. However, the statistics are so heavily against us at this point that I can't find room for doubting the diagnosis.

I hope she's right.

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