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 !!!!
youngbreastcancersurvivor 