Chemo Take 2

This isn't the happiest of updates to get back into regular blogging but I thought some of you might want to know what's going on with me these days. You may or may not know, but I had my 1 year checkup on January 10th and it was great. They said everything looked great. Little did I know, less than 1 month later I would head to the ER to find out that my cancer had returned in my liver.

To say January was an unhealthy month for me might be an understatement. We got back from Christmas in North Carolina on January 5th and I woke up on the 6th with a scratchy throat. This turned into a good old fashioned cold and I blame all those people on the plane. The next week, it seemed I came down with the flu although I was never tested. I had a fever, the aches, and just felt blah. You know, the flu. I had pretty much recovered by the end of the weekend but I kept getting a low grade fever. That following Wednesday, January 22nd, while Mark was at soccer, I had these crazy pains on both sides of my rib cage that felt like all my muscles in my abdomen were cramping. When Mark got home, he helped me to the car and we headed to Urgent Care. They couldn't really tell me what was going on but they did give me a shot for pain...in my butt. Their best explanation was my muscles were spazzing from all the coughing I had been doing.

I decided to visit my general practitioner the next day just to get her opinion too and she pretty much came to the same conclusion but ran some additional tests to make sure. Everything came back fine but she said to touch base after the weekend and let her know how I felt. After the weekend, I was still having lingering abdominal pain and low grade fevers. By the time she called me back, I had developed a rash on my chest (it only lasted about 4 hours) so I went back in to get checked out. Still nothing showed on my labs so she said to see if giving my body some time to recover might help and to come back in two weeks.

Well, by the next Tuesday night, February 4th, I still wasn't feeling any better so Mark told me I just needed to call Wednesday morning for an appointment. This led to more lab work, which included testing all of my liver enzymes, and scheduling an ultra sound of my abdomen on Thursday. My general practitioner called close to 6 with the results. She called back within 5 minutes of hanging up with me and told me she'd feel better if I went to the ER to get a CT scan because she wanted to figure out what was going on before the weekend.

Off we went to the Mayo hospital. When we finally saw a doctor in the emergency department, he suspected something going on with my gall bladder. He said I looked a little jaundice (yellow skin and whites of the eyes) and he wanted to check my bilirubin levels. They came back elevated so we started with an ultra sound. This revealed a blockage of my bile duct and spots on my liver. My response was, "spots as in cancer?" Spots is pretty vague to me. Well "that was what they were afraid of given my history." So then I had a CT scan done with contrast and it confirmed everything the ultra sound said. They told me they were going to admit me because I had a pretty nasty infection from the bile duct being blocked causing bile to be pushed back into my liver.

After a very sleepless night of doctor after doctor coming into my room, and me calling my family when I was awake throughout the night and knew they would be up, we learned that the gastrointestinal doctors planned to place a stent to get the bile to flow out of my liver. This wouldn't be done until Friday because I needed 24 hours of antibiotics in me first. And then I would have to stay 24 hours after the stent was placed to make sure I didn't have any problems. So at least 3 nights in the hospital, check in Wed night and not leave until Saturday. Boo!

We did get a visit from the oncology doctor on rotation Thursday afternoon who told us they were pretty much 100% sure my breast cancer was back in my liver. The radiologists were that sure from the scans. I was told they had already been in touch with Dr. Northfelt, my oncologist, and he was already working on a plan. This was not quite what we were hoping for, of course, but we're going to beat it and that's all that matters. We did have some friends visit on Friday afternoon and evening that really helped lift our moods.

On Thursday, Dad decided to fly out on Friday and he actually got in shortly after the endoscopy they did to place the stent. It actually worked out nicely because I was a bit nauseous after the endoscopy and they gave me something for it that knocked me out for about 2 hours and so Mark was able to pick up dad and be back about the same time I woke back up. After being on a no food diet or clear diet since being admitted on Wednesday night, I finally got to eat a turkey sandwich for lunch on Saturday and they let me go home that night after my 6pm antibiotic.

Mayo Hospital Lobby - that window above the tree on the left was my room for 3 nights

It was definitely nice sleeping in my own bed Saturday night and I got a lot more sleep than I had in days! Sunday was a pretty good day until I started having pains on the right side of my abdomen again. After talking to the doctor that had released me, we decided to go back to the ER to be safe and make sure nothing had happened with the stent. They decided to do a CT scan of my lungs to make sure there was no blood clot. This turned up nothing. My lungs were clear, which was a huge relief after I started thinking of worst case scenarios.

They decided to keep me overnight again so they could have me checked out in the morning but the morning ended up being afternoon because apparently nothing new was wrong with me. They think I just started feeling pain from the endoscopy and stent that I hadn't felt before so they sent me home with some pain meds. After a day of rest at home on Tuesday, I returned to work on Wednesday for the rest of the week and have been feeling better ever since.

I had my appointment with Dr. Northfelt this past Tuesday and learned what the plan is. Ai had a port placed today and I'll start chemotherapy on Wednesday. It's a 21 day cycle where I get chemo on the 1st and 8th day. Basically 2 weeks on, 1 week off. What they will be treating me with was found to be quite successful in a trial they did at Mayo a few years back for people with metastatic breast cancer in their liver. I did find out that I shouldn't loose my hair or get as tired and worn out as I did last time. We'll do this  treatment for a few cycles and then do a scan and make sure it's responding how they want it to. As long as these meds are working, I'll stay on this 21 day cycle until the doctors see results they are happy with. Then I'll be put on a stronger hormone therapy.

I asked why they thought it came back and their best guess is my cancer didn't actually feed off of estrogen which is what tamoxifen was blocking. They are just now learning of all sorts of things cancer feeds off of and it could be any number of things. Hopefully we are a bit more successful at blocking the food source after this round of chemo. I know they told me they can't "cure" me since it came back, and I don't really know or care what the doctors prognosis is, but my plan is they are going to fix me right up and we'll just get on with our lives.

I believe that your prayers and positive thoughts go a long way to helping make a difference so I ask that you pray for this concoction of chemo drugs to be the key to killing this cancer once and for all.

Here's to kicking cancers ass...again!