My Very Own Award! (Sort of)
Knowing I needed to get my lung drained more often than I had hoped, we put in a Pluerx catheter which allows me to drain my lung from home. What I didn’t expect is that for some reason it hurt like heck to get it in! Mike took photos of the process, but they are a bit bloody (grotesque if you aren’t a medical person) and looks painful, so I am going to leave them off. I know many many people don’t experience pain...
Life Can be so Draining
I went in last week to get my first exciting pleurodesis for my pleural effusion (draining of my fluid in the lining of my lungs). I had had a cough for a long time, but I assumed it was just the metastases in my lungs, I didn’t realize my lung was shrinking away and being surrounded by fluid that now also had metastases in it. They pulled out 750 ml. It was mostly just uncomfortable until the very end where it hurt a bit. Deep...
Wearing a Jane and Monthly Check-Ups
Yesterday was time for my monthly check-up with my oncologist. I am at the hospital twice a week for my intrathecal infusions, so I feel like I live there right now. My mom probably does too. I was contacted by Sharon Linder the founder of http://www.GetJanes.com. I don’t share very many products on my blog, if I do it is something I can try that I think readers may like or something I can give away that I think readers will...
Bad Tumor Markers, Go Sit in the Corner
Maybe I hang my hat on tumor markers a bit too much, but I had high hopes that Xeloda was going to give me a break from jumping from treatment to treatment. This year we have done Taxotere, Kadcyla and Xeloda and watched my tumor markers spike up. Here is the graph for this year alone: Here is the chart from my diagnosis with stage IV breast cancer: I have seen Xeloda work miracles for so many people, I am going to be bummed out if it...
CSF you are Testing me!
Friday was an exciting day, or so we thought? My brain/spine oncologist announced that I had had a cerebral spinal test come back with no cancer cells. I was elated, surprised, but elated. There seemed to still be a decent amount of cancer in my cerebral spinal fluid in my spine from my MRI, but I am going off my eyeballs looking at something I am no expert in and I don’t know how much chemo it takes to knock that much cancer...
Remembering and Forgetting and Remembering to Remember
I have been holding on to this post for quite some time (I keep forgetting to post it, chemo brain-much?). A couple of my friends had offered to write posts for the blog offering advice about how not to murder your friend with cancer (dark humor gets us by sometimes). Christine’s post is probably more befitting of where my brain has been more recently. My friend Kaz also wrote a past post called Support is About Showing Up....