Remember the post nearly two weeks ago, Jumping Through Hoops Like A Kangaroo? We jumped through all the hoops necessary to get our medications sent to us in Australia. We were kangaroos performing for the Customs and Quarantine Circus.
Luckily, they were not clowns, and FedEx delivered our package to us today. YAY to FedEx!!!!!! (Delivery dude had hair that rivalled Albert Einstein, but thick black hair - just that moussed to the static-electricity-finger-in-the-socket point.)
So we have meds for three months.
And YAY to my brother for doing all the paperwork at his end, packaging, getting everything to us!!!!! Wooooohoooooo and big shout out to Howdy!!!!
So - the other medical update. Saw the specialist doctor (and it's very strange, she's a surgeon, so she goes by the title Miss rather than Doctor - because Doctor is for plain old doctors, and as a surgeon she's higher up in the medical hierarchy - so she's Miss. Very confusing for us, but hey, we're just Americans in Melbourne. Anyway......) - digression aside, we saw the specialist doctor, she looked at the mammograms and ultrasounds and did some testing - and there's nothing definitive. No "yes this is benign" or "no this is sinister." (Read, malevolent. Evil. The Wicked Witch of the West. Lord Voldemort in my breast.)
The choices are to remove the milk ducts now, in a place that has familiar medical practices and with a specialist who is known for her work in the field (I checked) - or take our chances and wait to see what happens down the road. As in, maybe things will clear up on their own (after having not done so for about three or four months now) or maybe things will get worse (like become sinister and need major surgery while we're in Ulan Bator - which is in Mongolia, in case you didn't know).
Yeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaah. I'm not good at waiting around for things to get worse. I'd rather just take out the dysfunctional body parts and move on - which, according to online sources, is the usual procedure for this. Also what is recommended by our niece the doctor, my former doctor in St. Thomas, and my friend the medical research statistician at NIH. (YAY for the internet, so we can check info plus get second and fourth opinions from these wonderful people who so willingly share their expert opinons.) So we're scheduled for day patient surgery (outpatient for my American friends) on 19 February. I'm to check in by 7 AM and will be ready for pickup about noon or so. I'll sleep off the anesthesia and be fine in a day or so. Not a big deal. We hope not a big deal. Because the milk ducts that will be removed will go to Pathology, and we'll see if Lord Voldemort is around or not.
Doctor (sorry, MISS Doctor) wants us to hang around for a fortnight after surgery. Really, that's what she said - stay in the area for a fortnight so she can be sure everything is healing well and there's no infection. I've never
heard anyone use "a fortnight" in a sentence in real life, only in
books - the same books where I read about sultana cake and Guy Fawkes and all that. We'll hang around Melbourne for a fortnight. Enjoying all that Melbourne has to offer in a summer - great weather at the moment, free concerts on Wednesday nights, lovely cafés, penguins at the pier. Things like that. Maybe take a day or two to go to Phillip Island, where the penguins outnumber the people by about 3 to 1. (You know I can't resist a penguin place like that!)
We're moving to a different guesthouse on Thursday (tomorrow) - our room was booked by others before all this stuff came up - so we'll get to know a new section of Melbourne, closer to the city, right by the Botanical Gardens. Should be fun, though we'll miss our Jewish neighborhood with the rugelach, bagels, kugel, and hamentaschen (which are called hamentasch here, they leave off the "en" at the end).
So - love to all our friends and family, thank you all for the well wishes, and I'll continue to blog (and try to get Richard to blog) - and we'll keep you all updated.
[she bows to her adoring audience]
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