Ode to My Ovaries

Ok, not really. I am not sure I can write an ode to them, they haven’t done me a lick of good. No kids at my house, just two furballs and an adult male (who is not a kid, because I am pretty sure he is more mature than me at least 50% of the time).

For those that know me, I was not really planning on kids before I had cancer. I had a minor moment when I went through temporary menopause during chemo where I freaked out, but other than that my biological clock must be broken. There are moments where I sort of wish that I could have the option not to make this kind of decision, but the only way Mike and I would ever have a kid at this point is by surrogate (which we chatted about), and that is complicated and expensive and I don’t want a baby that bad (plus I hate to bring a baby into this world, when we aren’t quite sure how much time I will have left on it).

So in our discussion today on my next stage of treatment, I still wanted to take the ovaries. There are many more options out there for treatment and it is a more effective solution at shutting down estrogen in my body for those thirsty cancer cells that are 95% estrogen positive (they went from 90% to 95%, boy do they loooooove themselves some estrogen). We looked at a few studies, and all of the ER+ studies available at Huntsman required me to be HER2/nue-. Bah. So the plan is Letrazole/Femara once my ovaries are yanked, along with the monthly Zometa infusions.

We were going to do a Lupron injection, but it ups your estrogen for 1-2 weeks, which sort of defeats the purpose. My surgery is in 2 weeks, so now we just keep feeding the cancer until I have surgery (we’ll pretend like that doesn’t stress me out just a little bit).

We went over what happens when the ER+ medications stop working. That is when we start the HER2/nue medications (the first one will involve chemo also, one that will involve me losing my hair). Until then, I will be a hairy Mandi. Which means we are saving the Her2 approach until after we have tried the effectiveness of cutting off estrogen.

That is how metastatic breast cancer works. You use a treatment until it stops working. You then move to the next one… The next one… Those creepy little metastatic cancer cells usually figure out how to get around your treatment eventually, thus you have to move on to the next. Tamoxifen was my first line, it worked for 2 years. It stopped working. Now we try something else.

Since we didn’t add infusions – I may yet get away without having to get a port.

My tummy is still making me a tad bit crazy, but I am back at work trying to make it through the day, my back feels much better though. One day at a time. 🙂

scratches

My oncologist carefully draws out all of the options in the short and long term and how they work.

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Author: Mandi

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