The medical details

I remembered reading somewhere that you should record your appointments with your various doctors since you wouldn’t be able to remember them all. I tried but only one of the three would allow it. First up after my initial diagnosis was surgical oncology. At this point I had only had biopsies and a mammogram and we thought I was stage 2. They even wrote it down. 2B. I still have the paper. It’s as if I kept it I could hold them to it. The plan was to operate and remove the tumors and then we’d look at chemo if necessary. Oh how I wish this could have been the case. I’m so jealous, so, so jealous of stage 1-3ers it’s not even funny. I know that sounds a bit odd but when I hear someone is diagnosed with breast cancer and they get to just have an operation and maybe a year or six months of chemo I just want that to have been me so badly. And we thought it was, for a couple weeks between my biopsies and my scans.

After the surgical plan is in place comes medical oncology. This is to get a chemo plan in place. I liked to think of her as my meds person. Then the plan was after we tried to get rid of everything or at the very least shrink it all we’d operate and get the rest out. That was before the scans came back. We couldn’t operate on my spine or liver and they typically don’t do a mastectomy on stage 4 patients, so I headed over to radiation next. Radiation oncology was something else. They fit me for the scariest mask and bolted it to the table to possibly radiate my Cspine. I later got small black dot tatoos to radiate my chest.

So now we are pivoting. Plans are changing. No option for surgery and straight to hard chemo. They send in a pharmacist to go over all your chemo medications with you that you’ll be having. It was about 20 pages of paper and she talked at us for over 30 minutes. We just sat there. We had nothing to say. The side effects, the long term issues, the though of putting actual poison into my body when I didn’t even use sunblock that was mineral based.

We had to see if we could clear up my spine, hip and liver, as well as my breast tumors. But wait, one last initial doctor. My hip was so bad my doctors sent me to orthopedic oncology to see if my hip could even withstand chemo or if I needed a hip replacement before chemo. Thankfully, the wonderful doctor felt we should risk it since I was having no pain and in good shape. If only I knew how fast that was about to change.

Six sessions, three weeks apart of TCHP. I knew the names of the drugs, I knew what they were used for, I knew how long I’d be sitting in that chair and I knew what we needed to accomplish but I had no idea what was coming.