My doc had to grasp and pull my tongue far forward in order to get a good look at the back portion of the healing area. He was as careful as he could be, but stretching and moving tissue I had been carefully NOT moving for the previous seven days dropped me back to about day three post-op on the “Holy crap, that hurts” scale.
I like my doc, by the way. He is determinedly and ferociously competent, which is the absolute best quality to have in a surgeon. He’s also a nice guy, and I appreciate that too. A lot.
But when your life is at stake, competent beats the shit out of nice.
Anyway, the results for the remaining tissue in the lesion came back with the result of “mild dysplasia.”
Dysplasia is not cancer. Dysplasia is cells that are changing in a way that can become cancer.
Mild dysplasia is better than cancer in the same way that a little poison in your system is better than drinking down a whole bottle. So this is not fixed, done, gone.
This is ongoing, and I’ll be going back to see him every four months.
In the meantime, I’m not going to hope everything will be okay.
I’m doing research into what I can do to prevent cancer. Because I don’t have it, I don’t want it, and I have had a warning shot across the bow from just about the scariest gunship out there.
I will follow conventional treatment. At the same time, however, I’ll look for ways to strengthen my immune system and decrease my intake of problem substances (transfats are evidently more of a problem than I’d though, for example).
And when I know how I’m going to handle this, I’ll pass it on here, in case you might find something of use in what I find out.
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