So after my talk with the radiologist I decided to research breast calcifications a little. Turns out you can spend hours and hours surfing the web about this topic. My research told me that 23-30% of breast calcifications that resulted in a biopsy were cancerous. The vast majority of these were ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), which is really stage 0 cancer. However, left untreated a certain percentage DCIS lesions become malignant tumors. I wouldn't stop at that information, however. Soon I was looking a mammograms of all sorts of lesions and comparing them to what I remembered about what my calcifications looked like. I read blogs, and studies, and more studies, and excerpts from textbooks. I think I could maybe pass for a third year medical student at this point. Of course, the only thing of this surfing accomplished was to cause me ever more anxiety. I developed stress colitis, and couldn't sleep, and was very unproductive at work.
I finally decided to move my biopsy date up a little, to Wednesday, March 16. That way I'd get an answer before the weekend. That's all I needed - an answer. Then I'd be ok. Three more days and I'd know.
Of course the radiology gods had other ideas for me...
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