Hi friends. Well I turned 45 yesterday which is a great thing! You learn to celebrate the passing of each year with a cancer diagnosis. I wish I could say the day started off good but I had some crappy news at the start.
I went in for chemo (yes, birthday chemo) and to meet with my oncologist to review the results from my CT scan on Thursday. Brian was with me and we got the unfortunate news that my cancer has totally progressed. All the spots on my liver are about 3x larger (about 1.5 cm from .5 cm). There is also some calcification on my lung lining in addition to the ongoing fluid. Which I believe means that could turn into actual tumors. I also have two lymph nodes in my chest that are filled with cancer. So overall not a good result.
What this means is my chemo drugs (taxotere and cytoxin) are not working on my cancer. They are very strong chemo drugs so that means my cancer is extremely resistant to mainline chemos. Usually chemos stop being affective after a certain amount of time, but it’s rarely this quickly. So my onc said we just have to keep trying different chemos to hopefully find one that my cancer responds to. Yesterday I started a chemo called Eribulin (aka Halaven). It has fewer side effects than the taxotere and cytoxin and is administered much quicker (it only takes about 3 min to get the medicine – about 45 min total with my pre-meds). In fact today I feel pretty good – just mild nausea and a little worn down.
The other thing Dr. Rinn suggested is to look into clinical trials. This is the first time she’s suggested that, so I know she’s feeling really serious about this latest development. A clinical trial means trying medication that is new or newly discovered for treating cancer. Currently Swedish doesn’t have any trials that I’m eligible for, so she’s going to check with the UW here in Seattle to see if they have any good trials. Otherwise we’re going to have to travel out of state. The top research hospitals are in Houston, NYC and LA. So we’ll also reach out to those hospitals and see what we can find. If I got into a trial with them, it would mean traveling to those cities at least every couple of weeks. So that could get interesting…
I’m feeling scared but ready to take on this latest set back. And it helped to come home to a beautifully decorated house and a wonderful dinner with all my best friends. I think it will take me a few days to really comprehend what this means, but as always I’m feeling up to the fight and hoping for a good result from the latest chemo.
More to come…but wanted all my wonderful supporters to have the latest info. Much love, M
