Two Poke Tuesday
Well, I think this is the first time a chemo nurse had to poke me twice. I think I might have been dehydrated from being too lazy to walk to the water cooler at work on Monday. Sigh.
Other than that, chemo 6 of 12 taxol/herceptin went well, and I’m halfway done with it. Starting to think more and google more about mastectomies and recovery times. Counting up vacation and sick days, filling in medical leave papers, etc.
Yesterday after chemo I did a *lot* of yardwork. Some side effect of a side effect drug kept me up late, too, so I had 5 hours of sleep. I’m itching to do more yardwork though. Busy with working from home for now, maybe at 5pm I’ll go out there and throw the entrenching tool and the shovel around some more.
I am completely ashamed when I read this and think of my yard . . . egads. Congratulations on getting past the 50% point. I don’t think I understand how the whole deal works — surgery after chemo?
In the yard I just want to make one flat spot big enough for the Ezi-Up Shade and the hammock. And… for the yard to not catch on fire, from weeds. It’s almost fire season here. Ten minutes at a time of yard work exhausts me.
The tumor was frickin’ big. 8 cm in one direction and very fat. Go look at a ruler. Someone who works in the industry thought I got the cm vs mm wrong. So, I held out my fingers and said it was This Big. Her eyes got big and she said “ooooh.”
So they wanted to shrink it first, they said. My own feeling was if it’s that big, it’s probably “out there” in the rest of my body, even if just a few cells here and there so far, so let’s get to the chemo. Surgery won’t fix that part.
I still might have to get most of that breast removed, but surgery back then would have given the cancer weeks more to grow anywhere else. And… it seemed like I could see it growing, in the breast. (This was even before they found the liver thing, that might not have been cancer, after all.)
1.5 years from clear mammogram to 8 cm tumor. SCARY FAST. I think that’s why it shrunk so fast though. So hey, it’s still good news over here. But that’s why chemo before surgery.