The Lump
In mid-August 2018, when I was getting dried after the shower, I noticed an almond sized and shaped lump in my right armpit. While we didn’t panic, we bag a process of trying to determine what the lump was. Kim was sure that the lump was nothing more than a fatty deposit. There had been nothing suspect about my life to believe otherwise. While I had been sluggish for much of the summer, we attributed that to my body needing time to recover from roofing the house over the course of ten days. In early August, however, my energy had began increasing and I was settling back into a normal workout routine. In the moment of finding this lump, we didn’t connect the summer sluggishness with the lump, but we would later come to realize that they were very likely connected.
The Dig
To start with, we scheduled an appointment with my Primary Care Provider. His initial response was that it was likely nothing more than a fatty lump, which is what Kim had thought. He suggested two avenues: we could wait and see what happened and act if anything weird happened or we could pursue further testing. As a 31-year-old, I figured there was no harm in pursuing a random lump of fat. If that’s what it was, case closed.
So, we decided to have further testing done. We had an ultrasound scheduled to see what the lump contained. My PCP was wanting to see if there was any blood flow to this mass. I drove to Richfield in order to have the imaging done. They did a simple ultrasound in my right armpit, which is slightly awkward. When the results came back, my PCP informed me that he did not see any blood flow to the mass, which in his opinion, would mean it was likely a fatty deposit.
For whatever reason, I decided to call my uncle, who was an oncological surgeon to ask for his opinion. When he heard about the lump, he told me he wanted to see me right away. I was up at his office two days later. After looking at the lump, he told me he was 95% sure that it was a benign mass, but that he felt it was better to be safe and have it removed.
The Operation
That Friday (August 31, 2018), I was in for early morning surgery at the IMC hospital in Murray, UT. I am not a huge fan of the getups for these procedures and I think my face demonstrates that. I especially don’t like that they keep the hospitals so dang cold while you’re wearing these gowns!
I remember waking up from anesthesia and Kim being by my side. She told me that the procedure went great and that when it was over, my uncle went over what he had found with her. I had expected to hear that it was just a lump of fat, but Kim told me that my uncle had informed her that he was rather worried by what he saw and that he felt it was likely cancerous. To be sure, a biopsy was going to be performed.
And so… The waiting begins.