Checking in on Amy

I had my first post-chemo appointment with my oncologist today and he had great news to share. My MRI looked really good! Lymph nodes are looking clear and there is only a very small tumour left in my breast after chemo. He explained that they can't even really tell if it is a tumour for sure and that it may just be scar tissue.  This was the good news I was hoping for, but the EVEN BETTER NEWS is that the planned surgery is a lumpectomy and lymph node removal! After mentally preparing for a much more invasive surgery I was surprised and delighted by this news. I don't have a surgery date yet, but it should be sometime in September. If they do a lumpectomy as planned, they will examine the tissue they remove (what remains of the tumour as well as the tissue around it) and that will inform the rest of my treatment going forward.  Tomorrow I have my first immunotherapy-only treatment (the drug is called Herceptin) which happens in the chemo suite where my other treatments were. ...

I'm 9 days out from my last chemo treatment and I'm feeling more like myself every day. :) Although I have probably lost sight of what 'normal' flavours are I'd say my tastebuds are at about 75% today, which is something to celebrate. My mouth has been sore the last couple of days; it was sore last round too and I'm not sure if I mentioned it then. I have avoided getting any actual true mouth sores but there is a tenderness to my gums and parts of my mouth that makes me think I narrowly avoided them.  Our morning walks yesterday and today were the first that have felt good from start to finish, so my fatigue is fading and that is nice. I'm still pretty tired after walks but it is nice to feel the small improvements. My adventures with the open wound meant way less activity than usual for the last few weeks and it feels good to get moving a little more. My brain is also feeling a bit more normal the last couple of days. Brain fog is hard to measure. Sometimes...

Well friends, two new chemical elements have entered this body, so my collection continues to grow. Yesterday morning I had my MRI bright and early. It went well; I'm not more claustrophobic than average, but mine was done lying face down so I actually had no sense that I was in a tiny tube. It was noisy of course, but not too bad. The contrast dye they use for that test contains the element gadolinium, which even as a chemistry teacher I don't really know much about. It sits way down low in the periodic table in an area we don't focus much on in high school (except a bit in grade 12 when we look at electron configurations), but I guess it's good for taking a closer look at tumours! My chemotherapy treatment took less than four hours, and the subsequent visits will be even shorter. I got three different drugs: Herceptin, CARBOplatin, and DOCEtaxel. The Herceptin is not chemotherapy, but just an antibody that blocks HER2 receptors on my cancer cells. They give the Hercep...