Update

Well, it's been just over a month since I had my bilateral mastectomy. The surgery went well and I am actually feeling really good physically right now. Probably because Gertrude is no longer trying to suck the life out of me and the doctors are not giving me regular doses of poison. My wounds are not healing as quickly as we would like, however, so radiation has been pushed back a couple of times. The soonest I will start is in 2 weeks, but my guess is that it will be longer. While I enjoy having days when I feel good and don't have to do treatment, with each day that I wait, the end date of active treatment is pushed back. I was hoping that I would be done by the end of the year, but after talking to my oncologist today, it is looking like February will be the earliest.

As soon as my chest wounds heal up I will start radiation along with an oral chemotherapy agent. I will do radiation 5 days a week for 33 treatments and will take the oral chemo every day one week on and then one week off. After radiation, I will start additional chemotherapy, adding two IV agents to the oral one. The IVs will be two weeks on, one week off for about 3 months.

The big wild card in all of this is a spot on my rib. Before I started chemo the first time I had a PET scan to check to see if there was cancer anywhere else in my body. The scan showed a spot on one of my left ribs. To give the doctors a better look I had an MRI, which was inconclusive. I had been skiing a few weeks before and had fallen A LOT (it was my first time) and so we thought that it was possible that it was a bruised or fractured. So, I did chemo and had surgery and then we did another scan and the spot is still there.

I had an MRI on September 9th and the report states: "Signal abnormality and surrounding edema persist in the left anterior third rib. Given the persistence of this finding and the bone scan abnormalities and the time, the possibility of metastatic disease to the rib is very real. I would have expected the healing process to have substantially resolved during this time, and the signal abnormality within the medullary portion of the rib is worrisome." What this means is that the cancer may have spread to my rib, but we aren't sure. One of the problems with this is that there is no easy way to test to see if it is cancer. In order to take a biopsy, I would have to have surgery. And right now, surgery would not be good for me because it would further put off treatment. Also, the treatment would be the same if we did find out that it is cancer--we are going to radiate the area and hope that it goes away.

The hard part for me is that if this spot is cancer, then I have Stage 4 cancer and that is very difficult to cure. I asked my oncologist point blank this afternoon if I was going to make it out of this alive and he said that there are no guarantees, but that he is encouraged by the surgical findings. He said that if it is Stage 4 we may not be able to cure it but that I might still live for several years. Cancer is considered "cured" when you are cancer-free for 5 years. I really do hate not knowing if this rib thing is cancer or not, but surgery just isn't a good option now. And I'm not sure how I would deal with that information if it came back as cancer for sure. I've been able to fight, in part because it seemed likely that I would be cured. When I was first diagnosed, we thought that I was Stage 2, which has a good survival rate. Now we know for sure that I am Stage 3 and possibly Stage 4. I know that these are only numbers and I shouldn't focus on them, but it is hard.

I'll have another scan after radiation, so we'll have some more information about the rib then. But for now I just have to wait and hope that it is not cancer or that if it is I can still beat this. I told my oncologist that I am going to be pissed if I went through all of this and still died and he said that he will be too. I am thankful to have so many people pulling for me and to be in really good hands.