Team of medics

I saw fourteen medical professionals yesterday:

1. staff nurse, Stef, who took blood pressure, pulse, temperature
   
2. a reassuring junior surgeon who likes her job because she sees people get better and that's what she went into medicine for. She drew in black felt tip pen on my breast, marking it with a big black arrow and the acronyms WLE and SLN for wide local excision and sentinel lymph node biopsy
   
3. a senior surgeon, but not my own, who told me they'd get me on the conveyor belt
4. a breast care nurse who told me that surgery was the first step to recovery and my cancer is oestrogen positive and that means I'll probably get hormone therapy tablets rather than chemo.
   
5. an anaesthetist who wanted to know about my dentures and crowns
6. three people in x-ray to do ultra-sound, insert a wire into the cancer, then x-ray it
   
7. two people in nuclear medicine, one to inject a radio isotope and one to photograph it reaching the first (sentinel) node of the lymph glands
   
8. another nurse to fetch us from one place in the hospital to another
   
9. another anaesthetist or nurse when I walked down to the operating theatre
10. my own surgeon - we made eye contact, not conversation
    
11. three anaesthetists as I went to sleep
12. two different anaesthetists when I woke up, one shouting "It's negative"
    
13. a different staff nurse on the new shift
14. a different breast care nurse who left me with a leaflet on arm exercises

I suppose that they all work together as one team.

Surgery

Tomorrow I go for day surgery, the start of the treatment for cancer. The surgery scares me less than anticipating chemotherapy making me unable to do things, like not being able to prepare for my viva, not being able to get the new job I want now I've finished my thesis. I want to travel abroad, but chemo makes insurance difficult I read. I have read loads of leaflets on breast cancer and its treatment and the side effects of the treatment, and it sounds a horror story that I don't want to know.

• Lymphodema in the affected arm because they take out your lymph nodes and your arms swells,
• Travel insurance companies turning you down because you're on chemo and might pick up any infection.

Pretty miserable really.