Starting Chemotherapy, The Red Sunshine (4/10/2014)

Three days after I froze my eggs and 6 days after I had my port placed, I was in getting my first chemo infusion. I was super nervous, once you start it you can't go back! Crazy thoughts: What if they were wrong again and I really didn't need chemo? What if I was allergic? What if I get really sick? I was scared to say the least. Matt was with me during my chemo and that was super comforting. Of course I was the youngest person there, although there were a group of younger women and you could tell they were the breast cancer group. Usually I'm pretty friendly and love to talk to people, but that day I didn't want anyone to know me, recognize me or talk to me about my cancer, I don't think I was ready yet. My oncologist and oncology PA/friend came to visit me and that made me feel super comforted.

The Red Sunshine refers to the medication adriamycin. It's red, it makes you pee red and its the most toxic of all the chemotherapy agents that I will be taking. I have 4 cycles of adriamycin with cytoxan and then I have 12 weeks of taxol after that. This is a pretty standard regimen. At first they were telling me I only had to have 2 of the 3 chemos, then they thought to be safe I should do all 3, and then they called be back and said that there was a new study (from Dec 2013) that showed that a 4th chemo agent called carboplatin (not new, but not usually used in breast cancer) used in patients with triple negative breast cancer (like me) had a much greater percentage of complete pathologic response. That means that peoples tumors disappeared! Now we won't know what it will do for my tumor because my tumor is out, but this is all for the just in case it spread microscopically to another place in my body so we can kill it so it doesn't come back.

This is always in my thoughts, the fear of recurrence. Everyone tells me I need to think positively, but it's hard to do that when you know what this demon cancer is capable of. I have the most aggressive type that has a 30% recurrence rate without chemo and with chemo it only brings that down to 20%. That is a huge percentage. And if it does come back it will be stage 4. So this fear does consume me very often throughout the day, but every night before I go to bed, I tell myself its not coming back and I will beat it, I hope the cancer believes me and doesn't smell my fear!