The hospital becomes your second home. You are there every 21 days for 6 - 8 hours at a time. The days in between you are back and forth for bloods, follow up appointments, immunity boosting injections, iron infusions, bags of fluid to rehydrate you. The nurses become your friends, the oncologist your wise leader in this rollercoaster of a journey.
Every 3 months you are scanned to check how things 'are going'. Scanxiety is real and the only people who get an opinion on this are people who live scan to scan wondering if this is the month where the cancer has grown, and all the terrifying things progression can mean.
I had the pleasure of having cancer treatment during a pandemic. So many of my non-treatment appointments ended up happening via WhatsApp. Please enjoy this picture of me trying to make sense of my CT scan via WhatsApp as my oncologist is explaining a whole lot at once.
The only thing I remember from this call is the tumour was shrinking. All the torture I was enduring was worth it, but don't ask me to point out any thing of note - I know nothing.
At the end of chemo I had claimed $90,000 of Health Insurance. That's only six months worth of treatment and I was going to need life long treatment. This is where I transferred to the public system for my ongoing infusions. I love my unit at North Shore Hospital, oncology nurses are special people.
I had a wee overnight stay in North Shore hospital after a routine scan discovered a blood clot in my lung - a pulmonary embolism and now I take blood thinners for life.
After 12 months of treatment, we had eradicated the tumours in my liver, and according to the mammograms and ultrasounds the same was to be assumed of the tumour in my boob. So planning began for a mastectomy. But before that I needed a little bum surgery, that we definitely do not need to detail in this blog!
A mastectomy is not usually an option for incurable breast cancer patients. But as I was diagnosed oligometastatic and had a complete radiological response to treatments it was deemed worth having a mastectomy as I was told 'cancer returns from cells sent from the primary site.'
Boobs
I had a skin sparing mastectomy with immediate implant reconstruction and a reduction of my right side to match my new implant. My surgeon removed 900g of tissue and replaced it with a 425g implant, then removed 450g from the right side to make them match.
This was a lot less painful than I anticipated it being. It was more annoying/inconvenient. I had to sleep on my back, showers only below the belly button, the drains pulled and the injections in my stomach each night, I finally got 'good' at doing them the night before the last one!
The removed tissue was sent away to pathology and the results came back complete pathological response to treatment - no cancer in either boob.
What comes next? Continuing with my infusions: Trastuzumab and Pertuzumab (immunotherapy) every 21 days to keep the cancer away. Daily Tamoxifen (hormone therapy) pills and Rivaroxaban (blood thinners) along with a Zoladex (implant) injection every 28 days. The goal is to live as long as possible with a good quality of life.
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