Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Step One: Surgery

I had a lumpectomy last Thursday. It was pretty much a piece of cake. The worst parts were, in order of terribleness:

1. hearing the doctor say right afterward "we saw some cells in the lymph node that we thought might be abnormal" and also that I only had one sentinel node to remove. I was worried that with only one sentinel node, if it showed signs of cancer I would have to have more surgery to remove axillary nodes to see how far it had spread. And then waiting to find out how this was all going to play out through yet another weekend of sitting around.

2. pretty significant nausea the rest of the day secondary to the general anesthesia.

3. not being able to drink coffee in the morning until it was too late and then I had a caffeine withdrawal headache all afternoon.

4.the underarm pain from where they took my lymph node, which was still not bad enough to take anything stronger than Advil, but meant I could not take a shower by myself for the first couple of days because I couldn't lift my arms to wash my hair.

5. having to sleep in a bra for 4 nights.


On Monday I emailed my oncologist to find out results. On Monday night, he wrote back an email that I have read an estimated 427 times since then:

Molly
The pathology turned out showing a stage one tumor. You will receive the less aggressive chemotherapy for 12 weeks. You still need to wait a total of three weeks from your surgery. Let me know if you want to come and discuss before we start or just start around the three week mark?  Congratulations, that's the best news you could have had
Mike


I cannot believe it. I fully expected it to be in basically every location throughout my body. The next day, my surgeon called and confirmed those results, and said we had clean margins too, which is also important. The tumor was 1.6cm. And now it is gone, and I can breathe for the first time in weeks.

Chemo will start March 11th. I wish it was tomorrow but I guess I can wait.

Monday, February 16, 2015

CANCER WTF

Okay, well, now we get to introduce another topic into the blog besides food, travel, and an epileptic cat. As I'm sure everyone reading this already knows, I have breast cancer. It is IMPOSSIBLE that I would have breast cancer, by the way. I'm Molly! How can I get breast cancer? But I guess everyone thinks that when this happens to them. I'm going to start updating here with what's going on so you can all know without me having to update on facebook or individually or what have you. I kind of hate cancer blogs because so often the person dies at the end and then it is sad. But I will try not to die.

I have a small lump in my right breast. It is 1.5cm. My doctor didn't notice it at my appointment in January, so it is also relatively new. I think both of those things are good.

It is ER+ and her2+. If you want to google what those things are, you can. I'm not really interested right now in googling for statistics and information but I know people that this isn't happening to directly might want to know more about the details and how this is treated in a general sense. The short story is that there are good drugs to treat tumors with those characteristics, and that is good for me.

I'm having surgery on Thursday, February 19th. That will be 2 weeks and 1 day (really, a 1/2 day) after I found the lump. My oncologist assures me the two week lag time is not medically significant but it has been an extremely unpleasant 2 weeks. I lost 4 pounds in 4 days, which is for me nigh on impossible. But I am doing better now with my surgery reasonably close at hand, and after having spoken with the oncologist today. And also with Xanax.

After I heal up from surgery, I'll start chemo, probably the first week of March. I'll either have chemo treatments weekly for 12 weeks, or every 3 weeks for 18 weeks, depending on what the surgery shows (i.e., the biology of the tumor and if it has spread to lymph nodes). Either way, after that I will  have radiation, and then continue infusions of a drug called herceptin every 3 weeks for a year. Herceptin is a newish drug specifically designed to treat her2+ cancers, and it does a very good job. Then finally, I will take anit-estrogen medication (tamoxifen) for five years. And we will hope it doesn't come back.

That's all I know right now. It's kind of fortunate I've been going to 12 step meetings for nine years because if there's one thing I've learned sitting in those rooms it's that "one day at a time" is not just a platitude. It does work, living your life that way. So that's what I'm going to do, and we will see what happens.