Chapter 4 : Chemo…yucky yucky Chemo….

August 2010: This is my last chemo cycle. I will continue to get bi- weekly Herceptin infusions for many more months., but no more Taxotere or Carboplatin. Yay !!! I have made through the worst.

It was a rough ride, I am bald, I have no eyebrows, or eyelashes, I have gained around 15 pounds, my skin is splotchy and pigmented in a weird way. I am tired all the time and food tastes like mud, yes literally mud. It is not that good on the personality side either. My parents have moved in to take care of me and keep the house in order while my husband deals with all these doctors appointments and infusion visits while working on his PHD thesis, and how do I repay them ?? Well I yell at my mom at every given opportunity, the TV too loud, its so hot in here, the food smells awful, so on and so forth.

Am I proud of all this, absolutely not, but I think I am lucky just plain lucky.

Mom and Dad still love their little monster of a daughter. Hubby darling knows that somewhere inside this  bald girl with a now impatient acerbic tongue lives the girl he fell in love with and patiently waits for her to return.

Thank you God for blessing me with this family!! Thank you.

I will try my best to be worthy of such a blessing.

Chapter 3: Chemotherapy…injecting poison into my body

Feb 2010: I come from a long line of health fanatics. Eating healthy, hitting the gym and treating my body as a gift from God comes naturally to me; but here I am, getting ready to inject poison into my veins.

My tumor is 99% gone, the surgeon removes what little is left of it, but my oncologist tells me that clinical trial is just that, just a trial. It is not FDA approved, so she has to follow protocol, she has to inject poison into my veins.

TCH, that is the name of the cocktail that I would be injected with, every two weeks, 6 cycles of it.

T : Taxotere

C: Carboplaton

H : Herceptin.

I am young, my kidneys function great, so she will be hitting me with dose dense chemotherapy. If I was older or did not have awesome kidneys I would have been given the cocktail every 3 weeks, giving my body enough time to recover. Suddenly being young does not sound so good, my body is going to be mercilessly hit, it is an all out chemical warfare on cancer and there is going to be major collateral damage this time.

When people think of chemo, they think losing hair and nausea would be the worst part, hell no.

I  care 2 hoots about being a baldie for a few months, I know it will grow back. Nausea, well, that is not that bad with the chemo I will be receiving, besides my oncologists have filled my medicine chest with steroids. Steroids take care of the nausea. I am tired most of the time, but I equate that to the discomfort you would feel when you are hit with a really bad cold, a cold that never gets better, goes on and on for weeks. Can I put up with this for a few months for a chance to go on living, oh yes, in a heart beat.

What  I mourn for is  my youth, today I have the ovaries of a 31 year old, six weeks later I will still be 31 but my ovaries might be 36, or 40 or even 60.

My husband and I do not have kids, we both love kids, how are my old ovaries going to give him the daughter he so longs for, how am I going to give him the son that he wants to play basketball with?

I pray that I am lucky and my ovaries come out of it as a 36 year old and not 66 year old.

I hate cancer, who does not, but I might lose some battles but I will win the war.

There are certain things I will have to give up, certain life milestones that I will have to reschedule, but I won’t give up. I won’t let cancer call all the shots. I decide to keep working. Of course I take the 3 days after my chemo injections off, day 2 is especially bad, I can barely get out of bed, but the other days I drag myself to work. I keeping working on complex projects, fortunately my brain still works fine, I can still create complex code and lucky for me my line of work does not involve much physical labor. Doing something that I love, continuing to work, going to the gym, watching movies, visiting a near by national park with my parents, well that is what keeps me going.

My body is tired but my spirit soars !!!!

Chapter 2: Hope , hope, hope….the most beautiful word….hope

Let the fight begin….

November 2009. A few days after my diagnosis, my husband rushes to me with his laptop. His eyes are bright with hope, there is a smile on his face, he has found something on the internet. He has found a survivor blog, someone with the same type of cancer, diagnosed 10 years ago. She was 28 when she was diagnosed, she is 38 now, she is well, has a successful career, in her blog she complains about mundane things like bad dates, ruining her outfit in the rain etc. Oh how wonderful, how I want to return to worrying about promotions, crib about commuting to work, be sad that my hairstylist is moving to a different city. That is life, she is living that life, she is not worrying about death, she is alive, if she is alive, I will be too. I will beat cancer, some day I will be penning my 10 year anniversary blog post. The fight is on cancer….the fight is on….

I meet my oncologists, guess what, Her2 might just be a blessing in disguise. They have a clinical trial for me, a targeted therapy. Lapatinib, the wonder drug, take a pill every morning for 3 months, lets see what happens. I won’t lose my hair, I won’t gain weight, it won’t make me nauseous. What is this wonder drug ?????

The dual prong attack begins, Lapatinib inhibits Her2 expression while Herceptin binds to the Her2 receoptors and blocks grown signal. It is not all that simple though. My tumor is triple positive, which means it thrives on the female hormones that my young ovaries produce in abundance. So along with doses of herceptin, I will be getting  monthly Zoladex injections.

Zoladex temporarily shuts down ovaries, I am officially in chemical menopause, I will have terrible hot flashes and my joints would be stiff.

Woah Woah, I am menopausal….but I guess that is a small price to pay and of course this is temporary, and completely reversible and look at the bright side, no monthly visits from Aunt Flo…Yay !!!

The first month I was a good girl, the onco nurse requested that I shut my eyes before the injection, I abide by her request, she had already injected a local anesthetic, I barely felt the Zoladex needle.

Next time around my curiosity  took hold, I took a peak, bad idea, the needle looks more like a screw driver, I panic, I am not letting her stick that in my abdomen, it took a lot of patience from my husband  to get me to a state where I would let the onco nurse come anywhere near me. I smile every time I think of this incident. I knew from the first time that it does not hurt that bad, but it was instinct I guess, no one wants some one poking them with a screw driver do they???

3 months later I cannot feel my tumor, its has melted away. It does not show up on my CAT scan.

It is surgery time, the surgeon finds no cancer in my lymph nodes. The tumor though too small to be detected on the CAT scan or be felt during physical examination was still there, but guess what, it was about 99% gone..

Yes, gone !!!

Round 1 …goes me to me….:)

Chapter 1: The Diagnosis …..

I have crossed the 5 year mark!! There were days when I thought that would not be possible. There were days when I dreaded what the disease would do to me, to my mind and my body. Yet, here I am, older, wiser (at least I believe so.;-) ), healthy and happy !!!

Standing here, I want to look back and chronicle my journey.

The Diagnosis 

Oct 2009, I am 31, married to the man of my dreams and hoping to start a family soon. I have it all planned out, kids, career everything up to kids college and our retirement, everything is laid out in chronological order in my head. I have no reason to believe these dreams would not come true, after all I have always lead a charmed life. Oh yeah, there is this lump in my right breast, I will get that checked out, but sure that is nothing. Just some gland gone crazy or something, I am young, I eat healthy, I don’t smoke or drink, I work out 5 days a week; yes, there is this weak family history with a Paternal aunt diagnosed at 65, but I am less than half her age and the nurse attended did say that when it comes to BC family history, Paternal aunts don’t count as much as Maternal aunts do. After the biopsy I plan to go to a movie with my husband, my arm is sore but that is okay, no big deal.

Two days later I am crunched over my laptop, my biggest worry is this is difficult to figure out software bug; I need to solve this, I need to be the one that saves the day, I need that promotion, I need that raise. Then the phone rings, its my doctor, she does not sound her cheerful self. We have found some cancer cells she says, and me , stupid me, my first thought is, I knew it was nothing, all they could find is some cancer cells not cancer. Split second later the realization strikes, cancer cells mean cancer. I have cancer, I have  a ticking time bomb inside of me. I am going to die. The next few minutes on the phone is a blur, jotting down names of the oncologists I have to visit, the tests I have to take.

I call my husband, we work on the same campus, he runs to my office building, we hug each other in the parking lot. We take the rest of the day off, and wander about the city, we visit the city zoo. All talk is about how his life would be after I die, how will he cope, he is just 30 he should remarry, have kids. I will be a jealous ghost, but I will understand.

A few days later additional details of my tumor comes in.

I am triple positive, ie Her2 +ve, Estrogen and Progesterone Positive.

I am Stage II A, they have found cancer in my sentinal lymph node. It has begun to spread.

Her 2 positive, sounds like a death sentence to me. Isn’t this is the  most aggressive of them all???