...my best friend in the whole world needs anything positive you can send her way.
She started noticing a few months ago that she was more easily tired than usual, and that her lymph nodes all over her body were starting to swell and her joints to stiffen. She's 34 years old, so she tried to chalk it up to being "not so young any more", but over the holidays, it became pretty obvious to her that there's more to it than that.
She just went in for testing 3 weeks ago. They've run her through every possible lab imaginable, and they've ruled out systemic infections, generalized inflammation, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and a whole host of other nasties.
The two potential diagnoses that they haven't ruled out kinda make us wish it WERE an autoimmune disorder: her doctors are now 90% certain that she has either lymphoma or breast cancer (the highest concentration of swollen lymph nodes is in her armpit, near her right breast). She will be having a CAT scan and a mammogram in the next week, and hopefully, she'll know what's going on after that.
Obviously, she's terrified, but she feels like she can't acknowledge that, for fear she'll worry her autistic 11 year old son and/or her husband. Our other best friend and I are about the only people she really feels like she can talk to, and even then, she's working so hard to put on a brave face, no matter what we tell her.
If you're a praying person, please pray for her. Her name is Beth. If you're not religious, please keep her in your thoughts and/or send "good results" vibes her way. Please also pray/send thoughts/vibes for me and our other best friend, Nikki, that we will find the right words to say to her and the right actions to take to make sure that Beth gets the help and support she needs from us. Thank you.
Re: Prayers, vibes, thoughts, whatever you've got...(kinda long)
What a scary thing to have to deal with. I'm sending lots of good result vibes to Beth, and keeping my fingers crossed.