Aftermath

I realized the other day that my main anxiety-based issue is not that I'm afraid I'll be in the small percentage of people who have a recurrence. It's that I'm afraid the statistics are all lies. In my heart of hearts I secretly believe everybody who gets cancer dies from it. Even though clearly that's irrational! I know it's irrational! But knowing and feeling are unfortunately different.

Yesterday I discovered estrogen positive but progesterone negative cancers have a slightly worse outcome than those in which the tumor is progesterone positive. So what's the statistic, in the big, long-range metastudy that came to this conclusion? That negative number? It's that only 97.3% of the Stage I progesterone positive achieved disease-free survival. I'm not even Stage IB, you know, I'm Stage IA, so probably my chances are even better than that 97.3%. Unless.... UNLESS!!...it's all lies. MAYBE IT'S ALL LIES.

Anyway, despite all that overall I'm doing okay. The real problem is that Banana has come to the end of the road with his epilepsy, and this weekend we are going to have to put him down, and the anxiety and sadness this is creating in me is spilling over into other things I normally wouldn't think up to be bummed about. Right now he's on three times the therapeutic dose of Keppra for his weight and twice the Zonisamide, and the seizures are still coming, and increasing in frequency.

Our wonderful, wonderful vet told me last week she would support us 110% in whatever we decided, and when he had another seizure yesterday and I called her, she said, "Molly, this is the right thing to do." She said he is the toughest case of feline epilepsy she's ever treated, and she believes he would have died at some point in the past year without our efforts in trying to keep him stable.

He has been the best of cats. Life isn't fair.

Status: Slow but Sure

It's been six and a half weeks since chemo but it already seems like a long time ago, which means I'm getting really impatient with being bald. I've been having to shave my legs for a couple of weeks (and annoyingly I am out of the habit, which means half the time I forget to do it) but the head hair is lagging. In the last week or so, it's finally starting to visibly grow in earnest, though, and it feels nice and fuzzy and soft. I'm really hoping for a non-shiny scalp by the time I go to NYC next month.

My eyebrows are non-existent, though, and I have maybe seven eyelashes on each eye. I can make up for the brows with pencil but I've quit any attempts at mascara as it just makes me look like a weirdo with seven eyelashes. Still, even that is getting better - you can see tiny lashes starting to grow on the bottom, and my brows have sort of a five o'clock shadow effect in certain light. 

This is pretty cool, too: I didn't lose any fingernails, thank goodness, but by the end of chemo they really hurt and were looking pretty gnarly. I keep them polished all the time so I only really see them between paintings, but today I noticed you can see a clear line of new, healthy, post-chemo growth. Yay!

As far as radiation goes, my whole breast treatments are over and I only have four more boosts (extra treatments aimed at the tumor site). My armpit is red and there are a couple of intermittently itchy areas, but for the most part radiation has been a piece of cake. I'm looking forward to having my mornings back, although I will say it's been nice to essentially work six-hour days for the past few weeks. 

I met with my oncologist last week for the first time since chemo ended and, as always, quizzed him about various aspects of the possibility of recurrence and he finally said, "well, I'm just not worried about it because there's a greater than 95% chance you aren't going to have a recurrence." I've read that some patients keep their ports in for a few years after chemo in case they need it again and to that he smiled and said, "you're getting that port out. Whenever you want." 

I have seven more months of herceptin treatments ahead of me, but it's really starting to feel like I've made it through and am on the other side. It feels dangerous to just move on with my life and stop worrying every second, but as we say in Nar-Anon, "living this day is the only way to have a life." So that's what I'm going to try to do.