Getting technical

This is for all of you medical and technical people :-).





It looks like my cancer is ER/PR - weakly positive and HER2 positive. This is actually a good sign since it means we can use more drugs to attack it. I will take an anti-estrogen drug (tamoxifen) after the chemo therapy for probably about five years. It means menopause will hit early - but it also lowers my chance of this beast coming back.





HER2 is a protein on the cancer cell wall. My chemo regimen will definitely include herceptin which blocks the HER2 receptor on the cancer cells. This is the easiest and mildest part of the chemo regimen and hopefully will work as one of the best drugs.





My cancer is locally advanced - meaning it is in one breast and barely into the regional (closest) lymph nodes. There is no sign of distant metastasis. There is a small chance that it is in my other (left) breast - so I have another MRI- guided biopsy scheduled for monday.





My chemo regimen is Taxotere-Carboplatin-Herceptin and will be given in six cycles - occuring every three weeks. The Herceptin will continue every three weeks for one year. I will definitely lose all my hair (no shaving this summer!!) and will become anemic (low red blood cells) and neutropenic (low white blood cells). I have to be extra careful of infection and will have blood tests many times throughout this process.





They know I plan to work through this process and are very supportive and encouraging. I am planning to cut back my hours - but the bottom line is that I really love my work and I have such a great support team at work.





I am keeping a postive attitude and working on preparing my psyche for the first treatment on tuesday morning. I am actually excited to begin this process and just get on with life.





Sharon


PS I know a few of you asked why the chemo-surgery instead of surgery-chemo. Both have the same outcomes - but if I do surgery first, there is no way to measure the effectiveness of the chemo since the mass will be gone. If I do chemo first, we can measure the shrinkage of the mass as a sign of the effectiveness of chemo. I like concrete data, so I want to do the chemo first and measure the progress (probably after 3 cycles).