Pieces of the Puzzle

Hello everyone!

As many of you know we had another doctor's appointment this morning. 
I will try to fill in as much information as I can think of!

First of all we would like to thank John and Maxine for coming along and being our "other parents" today. Your experience, knowledge and most importantly your support were appreciated in ways we cannot express. 

As previously stated we were first told about this on Friday morning. It was sort of like getting a really ugly 1,000 piece puzzle box with a mystery for a final picture. Where do you begin? Well, left foot, right foot.... let's start by finding all of the corner/edge pieces and putting them together to start building the structure of this journey and we can worry about the middle pieces later. 

Our weekend was very much like this. We just started finding pieces of information and found how they fit with our story and today we were able to snap lots of the edges into place. 

So, what pieces do we have...
Well we don't have all of the information as we are waiting for some more test results to come in and of course we need to wait for the MRI results before the doctors can finalize a treatment plan. That said they think it is likely a stage 2 invasive ductal carcinoma but there is nothing definitive in that as all the information has not been gathered yet. 

That said  Dr. Groot (our surgeon) was amazing enough to sit down with us on Friday and give us a brief  update of what some treatment options are. Although in honesty it wasn't a brief meeting at all and it was amazing that he spent so much time with us even though he wasn't seeing patients that  day! Anyways he met with us Friday so that we would have time to think about it and formulate an opinion of what route we want to take. 

Truth be told it's an incredibly overwhelming decision to make,as obviously we are not medical doctors! However we had the support of a very knowledgeable doctor who explained the whole thing to us, probably repeating himself 4 or 5 times after all our questions and helped us reach a decision that was right for us. In the end we know we will be doing "the whole meal deal" and it's a matter of when's and how's. We chose a treatment course called neo adjuvant. Which means that we are going to start with chemo therapy first, then do a surgery and then more chemo/radiation etc.

Now, some of you are probably thinking... what about her baby making parts..... great question! Steve was pretty worried himself! We will be going to a fertility clinic to get my eggs harvested and to discuss the best ways to protect fertility during treatment. This is being done on "urgent" status so that it does not delay treatment too much. For those of you who may have speculated... yes, I have decided I will be wearing my most cliche farming outfit I can muster.We have to find humor where we can in these situations. Harvest has always been my favorite time on the farm... hopefully this won't ruin it for me, lol! 

Now for the other good news. I get to keep my hair for about another month which is great as it gives me time to say goodbye to it and come to terms that it may never be quite the same. Even more good news that we are most excited about, we can  a)continue to live with our animals without putting them in harms way

and b) be out in the sun as much as I like so that I can lay in my newly renovated back yard and read books ALL day in the sun, be at the barn and be out on the water (my happy places). These two things really help us start envisioning some of the middle pieces and what the picture might look like, and we know this will be immensely important in keeping up our positive energy! 

Steve and I would also like to thank everyone for their immense support! It has been amazing the outpouring of love and support from a lot of people since we started sharing this journey with everyone. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Your love and support are greatly appreciated! 

Left foot'n & right foot'n

Alyssa & Steve