Next up: Drugs

Finally, finally, I start chemo on Wednesday. I've felt safer googling stuff lately and as a result of that I'm pretty sure my chemo is going to be a drug called taxol, once a week for 12 weeks, given concurrently with herceptin every 3 weeks, and then of course the herceptin will continue for another 9 months. Taxol given weekly seems to have very moderate side effects compared with other chemo drugs - some people don't even lose their hair, or at least not all of it. Regardless, I did this last week and I'm happy with it:

I also have a wig to wear to work but I think most of the time I'll just be bald or wear a hat.

The statistics for my type of cancer are all over the place, and I can either freak myself out or feel very reassured by what I read, depending on the source. The her2 positivity made it a very bad thing before the development of herceptin, so the older sources say that it recurs at much higher rates than her2 negative cancers. [I should say that "very bad" is still not actually all that bad, given that it's cancer. It's like 80% chance of no recurrence vs. 90%+ with other types. I feel Ben would want me to make this clear since I seem to be prone to catastrophizing and he is constantly having to bring up how "terrible" does not actually mean what I seem to feel like it means sometimes.] Neverthless, most sources seem to think that herceptin has leveled the playing field, that this drug has been a complete game changer, and that many oncologists are now of the mind that her2+ is a good thing, because the targeted therapy is so good.

Still, I'm just me, and nobody knows what's going to happen, and that's scary. We're hanging in there, though, doing regular stuff and being regular people. What else can you do? I still have a lot of books to read and TV shows to watch, after all.