Hematology/Oncology

Yesterday I met with Dr. Sh. He is my chemo guy. Nice guy. Young. Handsome. Smart. Calm. All the things I want in a person who is going to fill my body up with poison.

Yesterday was not that first time I walked into a cancer center but it was the first time it really hit me that I was walking into a cancer center. There was a bald headed woman there. And it stopped me cold. I probably stood there for 2 seconds but it felt much longer. And all I could think was “how did I get here?” His office is the place where my chemo will be administered. My chemo. Into a port that will be surgically placed below my collarbone on the day of my b/l mastectomy and will stay there until my chemo is done. Oh my….sigh….

Anyway, until the pathology report is back from my b/l mastectomy I won’t know what my exact cocktail of chemo drugs will be. It will be one of two tho, that I do know. So I’m not going to get into it. I could fill a page with the “if this then that” scenario but I’m not going to. And it will take about 2 weeks after surgery till I know which cocktail is mine, so you are just going to have to wait right along with me until I tell you about it. Waiting. Sucks, doesn’t it?

But, to the best of my understanding, this is what I do know. Because of my HER2+ (actually, the correct way to write that is HER2+++) status I will take Herceptin. This medicine is not chemo. It is a drug that specifically targets the growth properties of the HER2+ to keep the cancer from spreading (I hate to say metastasizing) throughout my body. There are studies on this drug going on to see if it can be used alone, but the studies are ongoing and so it must be used in conjunction with chemo. If I understood him correctly they will flood my body with Herceptin during each chemo treatment. Once chemo is done I will continue the Herceptin IV until I have had a years supply of it. My port will come out tho after the chemo is done.

I will take Tamoxifen for five years. I don’t remember if I start that before chemo, during or after. I will take this because of my mild ER+ status. That’s ER for estrogen. I wrote about that before so go back and find it if you missed it. Wikipedia explains it best: tamoxifen acts like a key broken off in the lock that prevents any other key from being inserted, preventing estrogen from binding to its receptor. Hence breast cancer cell growth is blocked. Got it?

Before, three weeks after chemo starts and every three months for a year I will have blood work done. And I will have something called a MUGA test. Not exactly sure what that is yet but I know it’s some kind of heart test.

I will not be allowed to have my reconstructive surgery until I am completely done with chemo. No one has told me that I need radiation treatments but if it does come to that I will not be able to do the reconstruction surgery until after that too.

There is more info I received, and more info I need to obtain, but I’m not going to discuss it yet because again, it’s a lot of “if this then that.” And I don’t want to talk about it.

The worse news I got yesterday was that because my chemo will significantly reduce my immune system and thus increase my risk of infections, Dr. Sh strongly recommends that I do not go into lakes, rivers and oceans because of the bacteria that float around in there.

Bummer