Orange Peel and Needle Art

Wait, I thought this was a blog about cancer. What do orange peel and needle art have to do with breast cancer?

I'm so glad you asked. The skin on my bad breast now looks like orange peel. Not the color--just the texture. The skin has dimples like an orange. The color is a lovely shade of red. So red orange peel it is.

But where does needle art come in? Simple. When I visited my surgeon this afternoon, who is a specialist in diseases of the breast, she did a sonogram of my breast and found a 1" cyst. So she used a small needle to deaden the skin and a bigger needle to aspirate the cyst. For those of you unfamiliar with the term aspirate, that means digging around with a needle, using the sonogram wand as a guide, until she was able to enter the cyst with the needle and draw out the fluid. That's where the art came in. Being able to find the cyst without feeling it was amazing art.

Anyway, she was able to aspirate some of the fluid, which she is sending off to culture. Once they have the culture back, the doctors will know what is happening. Most likely it is mastitis, which can be cured by antibiotics. We may have some preliminary results tomorrow, but the final results won't be in until Monday or Tuesday.

Please keep your fingers crossed for me that it's just mastitis! The alternatives are even uglier than red orange peel!