April Showers bring Good News!

April 4th my surgeon called to give me the bad news, I had breast cancer. She asked if I would be willing to undergo more surgery the following Friday, April 11th. They needed to remove more breast tissue and take out the sentinel lymph node to see it the cancer had spread, and by the way, her office would call and set up an appointment so we could talk about cancer and what was going on. April 5th Kiersten gave us a beautiful new granddaughter, Mackenzie Nicole, which was a glorious bright spot in what I was going through. April 8th, my Sacramento Family all got together and took me out to dinner to celebrate my birthday. April 9th we went in to see the surgeon and she explained I had "Invasive Ductal Carcinoma". It was too early to stage my cancer (decide how bad it was) because the cancer went up to the edges of the mass she took out so they didn't know if there was more left in my breast and they needed to find out if it had spread to my lymph nodes. I got to spend the next hour with a nurse being trained in all the possible eventualities and outcomes of surgery, which I won't go into because none of them happened, but I will admit Larry and I went home pretty shakened about what could possibly happen.
Friday April 11th, I had to arrive at the hospital at 7:30 as the surgeon had to inject my breast with a blue radioactive dye. This was done to follow the dye to my lymph nodes, so they could remove the first one that the dye hit to biopsy for cancer. The coolest part of all this is I peed blue for several days after the surgery. The surgery went well although the surgeon removed a whole lot more tissue than she said she was going to and luckily no cancer was found in the sentinel node so they didn't need to remove any more.
The following week I got the really GOOD news, I have stage one cancer and my cancer is hormone receptive. That means it should be really easy to treat-not that the treatments will be fun, but it should respond well to treatment. A hormone receptive cancer grows with estrogen so the Arimidex (the drug I have to take) will prevent my body from making estrogen so if any cancer is left it will have nothing to grow on.