Taxol is much better than Adriamycin/Cytoxin. Much. I have 6 more treatments to go and am on track to have March 31 be my last dose. Thank god. I'm mostly just tired of not feeling like myself. It's really hard to concentrate on anything for too long. And forget trying to multitask. I'm tired all the time. I get winded if I walk too fast, and I'm usually in bed before 9 every night - dead to the world. I don't have the nausea and headache that accompanied the AC, but the metal taste is still there most times and I get bouts of stomach cramps for no apparent reason. No one knows why. Apparently this is not a common side effect. But nothing makes it better except not eating - not my favorite alternative.
The weekly Taxol treatments are apparently doing a number on my blood count. Three weeks ago I almost had to skip a treatment because my white blood count was too low. The solution for this conundrum is to make me get Neupogen shots every Monday and Tuesday to boost white blood cell production. This lovely drug - a cousin to the horrible Neulasta that used to auto-inject itself into my arm - is not as bad as the Neulasta, but still makes me feel pretty lousy. Luckily, I don't have to go all the way down to Fort Collins to get it. I just hop into the Estes Park Medical Center and they shoot me up. A great way to start the day. It ends up feeling similar to the Neulasta - body aches, deferred bone pain - but just not as bad. Essentially, I come down with the flu minus the stuffy nose for two days. Because it affects me so much, though, this week we're trying one shot to see if that's enough to keep my blood count up. Hopefully one will be enough. If not, it's back to two a week.
The constant nose blowing has turned into a pretty tortuous dry nose that ends up bleeding randomly at least once a day. It usually bleeds in the morning when I get up - just starts bleeding - from both nostrils. On Saturday I had 6 - count them - 6 bloody noses throughout the day. Stellar.
The other little side effect that's starting to catch up with me is nail pain. My fingernails hurt. Especially when I try to do anything with them like open a banana. Very strange. Maybe it's because the chemo is killing off the cells that rapidly grow to create your fingernails? Not sure. That's my best guess.
My eyebrows and eyelashes are still hanging in there, but they're starting to fall out slowly. I've got a big gap in my lower right lashes that I've been camouflaging. Not sure how much more I can do about that. I may have to break into the false eyelashes eventually.
And finally, adding insult to injury, the weight gain is finally catching up with me. The decadron (steriods) they give me before each week's treatment is known to pack on the pounds. I'm sure the lack of activity doesn't help either. I try to walk 3 miles on the treadmill as much as I can, but it ends up only being a few times a week. So in addition to having no hair, having gaps in my eyelashes, and constantly having wads of tissue hanging out of my nose, I've also moved up to the next size in my uniform pants. Ouch. Husband is getting tired of me slamming myself for looking so very unattractive, and he tells me that all of these side effects are temporary. It's true. I know. But it doesn't help much. It doesn't matter that nobody else expects me to look attractive when I have cancer. I don't like looking like a cancer patient. I don't like not looking or feeling like myself. So I just try to ignore it as much as I can.
The good news is that in addition to all these lovely little side effects, the Taxol actually seems to be working. At my last exam, Dr. M was really happy that she wasn't able to measure the lump externally anymore. It has apparently changed shape - flattened out. I can still feel it, but it's definitely not as prominent as it once was. This is great news. With 6 more weeks to go, I'm hoping that things will squash down even a bit more. I admit that I do some manual squashing of my own, but I'm doubtful that this is actually effective.
So now that the end of chemo is within reach, it's time to start thinking about next steps.....surgery and radiation.
Dr. M says the tumor has moved back far enough that it seems like I can save enough of my breast to have what is called a "breast/nipple sparing" mastectomy. I know you all wanted to know that. But it's actually a really good thing because it will end up saving me from looking like the Frankenstein Barbie doll if it is, in fact, true.
The frustrating thing about preparing for surgery is that three separate doctors are involved (oncologist, surgeon, and plastic surgeon) and they don't hang out together. You have to see them all separately. The oncologist handles the cancer, the surgeon handles the mastectomy, and the plastic surgeon puts everything back together. So when I come up with my questions, they usually end up not being able to all be answered at the same time. Or they play the "ask your mother/ask your father" game. To make matters worse, right now I'm floating between two different surgeons and two different plastic surgeons depending on which procedure I go with. Nothing is easy.
So really the next steps are to decide on how many of my breasts I would like to keep and in what way I would like to reconstruct the one(s) that I lose.
I checked in with my plastic surgeon last week about my options. This is the same guy who endeared himself to me a couple of months ago when this whole process started out. I thought maybe it had just been a bad appointment because I had just started chemo at the time. Nope. He's as asshole. Don't like him at all. So this, in addition to the option of having a type of reconstruction that doesn't require implants, has inspired me to seek out a different plastic surgeon located in downtown Denver. A new plastic surgeon means a new surgeon, too, since I can't have surgery in one location and plastic surgery in another. So again....I'm waiting to hear back from the new surgeon to see if she'll take me on. Fingers crossed. But more on that in another post.
So that's about how things are going. I'm still working 4 days a week, trying not to look too sick on Mondays and Tuesdays. Trying to get my act together so I'm prepared when I have to take time off for the surgery. I'll be out about 4 weeks for surgery and then I'll be making daily trips down to Fort Collins for radiation. This all makes being present and effective during our busy summer season pretty impossible. Needless to say, I'm rather depressed about it. But I don't have much choice about it either. I'll do what I can.
I'm also on the home stretch of my Masters Degree in Adult Education and Training that I've been working on for the last year and a half. I started up again about 3 weeks ago. Including the class I'm in now, I've got three classes left to take and I'll hopefully be done sometime around the end of August. All in all the worst timed "enrichment opportunity" I could have taken on. Between the Centennial and the cancer, I've been pretty busy. But at least it takes my mind off things.
So now I'm off to bed. It's almost 8 and the yawning has begun.
I had a cocktail the other day - actually a beer. A wonderful Lugene chocolate stout from the Odell Brewery. I highly recommend them. I barely made it through one bottle, but damn was it good. You should have one, too.
Cheers to you all.
