Lymphoscintigraphy 4/1/13

My dad, boyfriend, girlfriend, and I drove down to Stanford the day before my surgery for a pre-op appointment. The scan/procedure was called a lymphoscintigraphy. My appointment was at 2PM, this is when they injected a radioactive substance into my breast. There were four injections, one on the top, bottom, right, and left of my areola. Luckily they used small needles but they felt like terrible painful bee stings! After the injections I had to wait two hours for the dye/tracer to travel. After the two hours they did several scans of my right armpit to check the lymph nodes.
The point of this scan is to find the sentinel nodes and see if they contain cancer so they could be removed during surgery. It helps the surgeon during surgery so they know which nodes need to be tested, the tracer is also a blue dye the surgeon is able to see with the naked eye.
After several scans the techs concluded the tracer/dye did not move into my axilla. We tried arm exercises but unfortunately it didn't help. I was pretty frustrated because we spend hours on this scan and I wanted the doctors to utilize it during surgery. I later found out that sometimes it takes several hours for the tracer to move and it was possible to still assist the surgeon.

Finally my last scan before surgery!

Met with Kacie and Ashley for breakfast before leaving Chico.

Grabbing a beer to calm the nerves ;)