The chemo treatment plan

 Here’s the high level treatment plan. I’ll be in chemotherapy for the next five months. I’ll get infusions every three weeks starting November 16th. After each infusion I’ll feel terrible for the first week while the chemo is working it’s magic. I’ll start feeling a bit better in the second week. By the third week I might be feeling almost normal. Then I get to go back and do it all over again! Yay me!

For any cancer junkies, here’s the chemo details as I know them right now. The treatment I’m getting is called TCH + pertuzumab. The chemo drugs I’ll be getting at each infusion are docetaxel, carboplatin, trastuzumab and perrtuzumab. I’ll also be getting targeted therapies herceptin and perjeta. According to my oncologist this is a fairly aggressive chemo treatment, but she’s expecting/hoping that it will kill and shrink all the cancer cells in my body so that they will have almost nothing to remove come time for surgery. Now that sounds amazing to me! I’m going to keep that thought in mind while I’m in the throes of chemo side effects.

After meeting with my oncologist, I’m feeling ridiculously thankful. The cancer I have is very treatable because there have been so many advancements and research in breast cancer treatment. My diagnosis is scary to me because cancer wasn’t even on my radar, but I feel like a routine case to my cancer team in a good way. They know what I have and they know how to treat it. Even though it is treatable it is an aggressive, fast growing cancer and that is why my treatment is moving along so quickly. 

The scariest thing to think about is what would have happened if I didn’t find the cancer now while it’s reasonably small. I’m 38 years old. Two years away from the time when I would be starting annual mammograms for screening. And even then my cancer would have gone undetected because it wasn’t visible on the mammogram. They had to use ultrasound to find it. The only reason this cancer was caught is because I noticed pain and a lump in my breast and I had good doctors who listened and took me seriously enough to thoroughly investigate it. I don’t have a family history and I’m mostly healthy. There’s no reason why anyone would be expecting or looking for cancer in me. So ladies make sure you are doing your self exam every month and if something feels different make sure your doctor knows.