Last Tuesday afternoon, late, the surgeon called and left a message: the tumor board had met that day and discussed the re-excision results, and they determined that “everything looks okay” on the margins.

I need to ask for more of the story, but my informants tell me that the radiation oncologist, surgeon, and oncologist confer at the tumor board and go over the slides and decide whether the lab was just being cautious or whether what’s on the slide is worth worrying over (or re-excising over, more exactly). The Dana-Farber oncologist said 98% of the time, when surgeons go back in after a result like that, they don’t find any more cancer cells. But she also said she would ask the DFCI pathologists to look carefully and see if they agreed with her, and would get back to me if they didn’t. None of this information was in the records she got from the oncologist’s office–probably because he didn’t have the information when he sent the records. I’ll be asking him about it tomorrow too.

I feel pretty driven to cross all these “t”s and dot the “i”s myself instead of just relaxing and letting these doctors take care of everything. Partly it’s that I want to know, myself, out of curiosity as to how these things work, and because the more I know about how it all works the more comfortable I feel in that world. And partly it’s because I figure that as an alert and curious patient, who only has one case of breast cancer to worry about (okay, two), I better be responsible for my own “minute” details, just in case, rather than leave it to the doctors who have dozens of cases of breast cancer to keep in their heads.

Of course, this disregards that useful invention, the patient chart. But there is always the possibility of miscommunication, lost reports, bad handwriting, whatever. When we told Dr. C., on Tuesday morning, about the newest report on the margins, he hadn’t heard of it yet and was very surprised.

My mom reminds Eric (and me) to doublecheck the IV bags during chemo to make sure the right poisons are in them…