Treatment decision

It was Monday the 25th, 10 days after surgery when we met my Oncologist Dr Chen. We went through the Cancer details and what she could do to reduce the chances of coming back. She recommended 8 sessions of chemo every two weeks, the first four will consist of AC (Adryamacin and Cytoxan) and 4 rounds of Taxol. My cancer was progesterone and Estrogen positive as well as HER2 positive. It means that after treatment I will be on hormonal treatment and Herceptin for some time...

Dr Chen was anxious to start, she said I had heal so well from surgery that there was no point to wait any longer, we decided to start first chemo treatment Monday 1st August. She sent me to do a Muga scan which is a heart scan as some of the drugs will affect my heart and we need a baseline to start monitoring it in the future. She also asked Dr Karin to set a chemo port in my chest as my arm veins were not strong enough to hold the 8 chemo sessions. We spent a lot of time going through the probabilities of cancer coming back anywhere else, she told me that based on how aggressive my cancer was and if I did not do anything I had close to 70% probability of cancer coming back. But if I did chemo, hormonal treatment, receptor and radiation my probability was around 10% or lower. That was music to our ears, after all the probability is lower than any other person in the US being diagnosed with a new Breast Cancer.

That week my friend Jen come with me to the hospital for the heart scan, it was nice to give Alberto a break from doctor's appointments. On Wednesday we met the head of the nurses at the Oncologist clinic for a chemo preparation session, I left the place crying and so upset!. What they do in these sessions is telling you the worst case scenario so they tell you so many side effects and so many horrible things that could happen to you that it depressed me like mad. Later on talking with Alberto we realized that this is the worst case scenario and probably 99% of the side effects are not going to happen to me. You absorb the information and translate it the way that is going to help you cope with the situation. On Friday I went to the hospital for the outpatient surgery of setting up the chemo port, it was a short and easy surgery and within 4 hours we were back home with a bump in my chest which suppose to be connected to the main artery near the heart.

The same week we met with Dr Wang who is my Radiologist, my case was border line between doing Radiation or not because the doctors said that if your main tumor is less than 3 cm and you have got less than 4 lymph nodes affected radiation might not be beneficial. However one of my lymph nodes was large and Dr Wang was incline to go with it. What they decided to do was to take my case to a tumor board the hospital, my 4 doctors presented my case to a group of 12 doctors and it was decided that Radiation will be very beneficial in my case and could prevent around 5% of Cancer coming back. For me only 1% was enough to do it so we decided that after Chemo treatment I will have 28 sessions of daily Radiation.