Nov
05
I have a high tolerance for pain. Anyone who knows me well – family members, doctors, estheticians – will confirm this. My husband and I agree: I am tough. Not French Foreign Legion tough, but maybe Canadian Special Forces tough.
However, for the last 12 hours and, to a lesser extent, for 48 hours before that, I’ve been enduring wave after wave of intense abdominal pain. I emit weird primal noises and make fists and kick one foot around like a dog dreaming of chasing rabbits… And then the pain passes and, like a crazy person, I type some more.
It’s the drugs – my hitherto mild-mannered capecitabine and lapatinib are now mercilessly kicking my butt. Causing stomach cramps, intestinal cramps, nasty, painful, crampity-cramps and no small measure of the trotskys… If it were possible to be punched in the solar plexus and kneed in the nuts while in labour, that’s how I feel.
I have a hot water bottle pressed against my stomach at all times. My husband makes them so hot they have to be wrapped in gigantic towels for the first couple of hours. I may have poached my innards. Don’t care – the relief is glorious.
My mom is now here, taking over where my husband left off when he went to work this morning. She has fed me mashed bananas and electrolytes and soda crackers. She is busy in the kitchen now – I can hear her over my own weird primal noises; the comforting sound of her clattering around down there.
Another wave is coming. I really need to stop with the typing. Viva Imodium! Charge!
My fridge runneth over. This is what being blessed looks like. And you haven’t even seen my freezer!
-
- a fridgeful of love
Jul
25
At about 5pm on Friday, my clinical trial nurse called to say that I needed to go to emergency to get my heart checked out immediately. Apparently a MUGA heart scan and 10,000 ECGs are not enough “checking out” for one week. I’m not complaining – as I’ve said before, if they want to scrutinize every blip and squiggle on my test results, I am happy for them to do so. Grateful, even.
It turns out my medical oncologist had reviewed all my ECGs, but since this new study drug can be hard on the heart (and given all the chemo, radiation and Herceptin I’ve had) she wanted me to be seen by a cardiologist before the weekend just to be sure there was no damage to my heart.
I was told not to be alarmed, that this was just a precaution and they didn’t think anything was wrong – but these kinds of assurances are always a little suspect when you are at the same time being urged to proceed immediately to the emergency department where the triage nurse and ER doctor have been notified and are expecting you.
I thought about riding my bike but then reconsidered, given that the storm clouds were about to burst again, and because this was, you know, a possible cardiac situation. My husband was still in a conference call and then had to pick up our daughter, so I called my friend Angelique. Not just because both her parents are doctors and she knows her way around a hospital, but because she is fantastic company in any situation, and I knew her tennis game had been rained out.
Anyway, it turned out that they processed me remarkably quickly, and “they” were without exception kind and friendly and professional. Plus the doctor who was responsible for me was young, personable, funny and, ummm, extremely attractive with a gentle, deep voice like Forest Whitaker’s. I blame that combo of qualities for any little flutters on the ECG. It was like being on a hidden-camera show, and Angelique kept making fun of me when we were alone in the room: “Oooh, Dr. Hot Doctor, listen to my heart!!” We were having far too much fun for a Friday night in Emerg.
After many tests and Q&A’s and a visit from a senior cardiologist who told me that the test of the liver enzyme that would indicate heart damage had come back negative – hooray! – we were free to go. Dr. Hot Doctor ran through a litany of possible symptoms that would indicate a need for me to run back immediately into his waiting arms (or maybe he just said to the emergency room) and then the nurse unhooked my IV and ECG leads, literally emancipating me at last. We thanked everyone for their excellent care and efficiency & Angelique was on the phone ordering sushi before I’d even changed out of my hospital gown.
Georgia was in bed by the time we got home but my husband was anxiously waiting, so we unpacked our take-out and ate dinner in my kitchen while telling him all about our Friday night at Emerg, including several embellishments about the charms of Dr. Hot Doctor.
Then, exhausted and happy to be home with my Mr. Hot Husband, my dear friend, and my at least passably healthy heart, we hit the couch to watch a movie and I fell asleep before the end.
Turned out to be a great night after all.
Jun
02
The following is a letter written by a woman I know, updating her family and friends about what she’s going through with breast cancer. Carol’s letters are written with a blend honesty, courage and humour as she navigates the sometimes bewildering and always surreal landscape of cancer treatment. I thought they should be shared. She agreed to let me post them. Here is one of the first, originally written in January 2009:
January 21, 2009
Subject: Update
The oncologist also has staged me as a 3A but they look at it a bit differently. What is the composition of the tumor/cancer, how aggressive was it and where could microscopic cells have spread to and what do I have to do to find those marauding cells and kill them so that we never have to deal with a recurrence?
We (Linda and I) met with the oncologist today at Princess Margaret (PMH). His interpretation was as follows:
-the tumor was large (4.5 cm)
-5/15 lymph nodes were infected (the cancer has learned to move)
-the tumor was very aggressive: Grade 3 (as he referred to the stages 1 thru 3: the good, the bad and the ugly…I had the ugly)
The “Grade 3” is important to him because it indicates the aggressiveness of the tumor, its ability to travel and, therefore, how aggressive he needs to be with treatment. Having said that, the cancer cells are Her2 positive and estrogen/hormone receptive, which is good news for treatment as they have drugs that can specifically target and bond to the receptors and prevent cancer growth.
What does this mean for my treatment? At PMH it would mean a standard protocol of 3 courses of FEC (the Google junkies may know what that means, this is a combination of 3 different chemo agents), followed by another three courses with Taxotere and Herceptin (approx 4 ½ months in total for chemo), followed by a year of Herceptin and 5 years of Tamoxifen. The radiation follows the chemo.
Where he threw us for a loop was in recommending that I go to St. Mike’s for treatment where they offer a different protocol – TCH. He feels this is my best treatment option, is the best treatment available and is currently the proven standard in Alberta and the US. This is available at St. Mike’s because they are combining this protocol with a trial with a drug called Avastin. But either way with this trial I get the TCH protocol which, in his opinion, is better than the FEC protocol currently available at PMH. The benefits of this are that I would receive the Taxotere and Herceptin at the very beginning – the “T” and the “H” of TCH (targeting the very essence of my type of cancer right away) and avoid some of the other more negative side effects of the FEC treatment protocol. Other than this difference the duration of this treatment is the same. After about 4 ½ months of treatment I would return to PMH for the radiation.
He was really quite firm that this was the bet route to go. PMH will also soon offer this treatment but they don’t have it yet (complicated to explain but I will if you want me to).
Long story short…I am going to see the oncologist at St. Mike’s, hopefully in the next few days, to discuss participating in their program. If for some reason I decided not to go that route, the doc a t PMH said I could go back to PMH and begin chemo there with no time lost. He did however say that he’d likely want to see a brain scan…to figure out if I was crazy for not going to St. Mikes…
That’s it for now. I’ll talk to each of you over the days to come but wanted to give you this basic info as quickly as I could.
xo cw
Apr
14
Shortly after my diagnosis someone referred to breast cancer as “the Sisterhood that nobody wants to join.” A kind of conscription-based sorority, with an irrevocable lifetime membership.
Once you’re in, the Sisters just kind of …find you. You can be anywhere, doing something perfectly ordinary, and – poof! – a perfect stranger suddenly appears with a knowing look, a quick question, and a kind word or good deed.
It’s a bit creepy, but in a nice way. And it’s uncanny how they spot you. Well, maybe not “uncanny” – the bald head is a bit of a give-away and if you’re a woman, statistically chances are it’s breast cancer.
I never liked the idea of sororities – and if forced to sign up for a women’s club I definitely wouldn’t have picked this one. Yet here I am: a full-fledged member of the Sisterhood, benefitting from the kindness of people I’ve never met or barely know. The woman at the bank, the woman at the EI office, Libby, Amy, Patty, the woman in the grocery store, the women who read and comment on this blog…The list is long.
No matter how much support you have from family and friends, the women in the Sisterhood have a special way of taking the “alone” factor out of cancer. They take it and stomp up and down on it and kick it in the hind parts for good measure. They show you that you can manage because they managed, and they’re still managing. No one makes you feel like you can beat it quite like someone who has the battle scars to prove it can be done. Even if it’s only done a day at a time.
