Could This Lipoma Be Another Cancer?

After surviving two breast cancers, I now have a lipoma (a large, fatty tumor) between my shoulder blades. Lipomas are usually benign, but mine has been growing, and it’s worrying me.

I looked online, as people with health issues are inclined to do, and saw a case where a 59-year-old man had a 12-pound, “baby-size” lipoma, which Dr. Sandra Lee removed in 2020. Dr. Lee (known as Dr. Pimple Popper) says that it was the heaviest mass she’s ever removed. Why the guy waited so long to have it excised is a bit of a mystery to me. Mine isn’t that huge, but it is around six inches in diameter. I can’t guess what it would weigh on the scale.

I recently saw a surgeon, and he said he’d remove it. Although it’s probably not cancerous, I’m going to have it taken off. It’s ugly. I’m self-conscious in a bathing suit. I look like the Hunchback of Akron, Ohio.

God, it’s always something.

I’m in an even bigger tizzy because my oncologist of 10 years retired in July of 2021. I have no one to listen to my worst-case scenario fears about how the lipoma might be a liposarcoma, which is a fatty malignant tumor.

Truth be told, I made an appointment with a new oncologist to see if she’ll biopsy the thing; the date is April 26. She, too, might just advise me to have it removed and biopsy it afterward.

Unfortunately, that means more surgery. The surgeon told me he’d have to give me anesthesia, which is the one thing I enjoy about a surgical procedure — going under and waking up. It’s fascinating to me how the drugs are so dramatic, how quickly they work. One minute I’m conscious and counting backward, and the next, I’m down, deep under in a dead space, and vice versa. One minute, I’m deep under, and the next minute, I pop awake when I hear my name called.

While I don’t mind the anesthesia in the surgical process, I can do without the pain that comes after the procedure. Plus, who in the heck wants another surgery scar?

There’s nowhere to hide this one. It’s not like a hysterectomy scar that sits under the belly or mastectomy scars that can be hidden beneath clothing. This mark will run down my back, visible when I wear a blouse. It will be a record of another tumor, probably not a cancerous one, but a tumor, nevertheless, grown by me.

Lipoma, you’re coming off!

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