Another bump in the road...and some fun! (June)

So I started Carbo with taxol, my new chemo regimen, and I felt more nauseated than I did with to so-called bad chemo, lost a few pounds because nothing tasted good and so on. Then I just received taxol the following week, I never got neutropenic (low white blood cells), but I did get anemic and thrombocytopenic (my platelets were super low). So then I couldn't receive my chemo the last 2 weeks of June, so I skipped 2 cycles and of course I have to make it up so this takes me out into september which is a total and complete bummer. Not to mention that its not good to skip chemo, so this is another bump in the road, and I am assured there will be more bumps to come. I guess this is par for the course. Along the same theme of "bumps in the road", I had to have my port replaced this month because the tip was in my tricuspid valve (this is not good!). So another procedure and more radiation with risk of infection and not healing because of the chemo, but it all turned out ok...thank goodness! In the meantime, I have made a friend in chemo, I call her my chemo buddy, Maggie. She is awesome because she has an optimism that I am totally jealous of, but its contagious! I think knowing her has made me more optimistic! I did relay for life in gig harbor, I literally found out about it that day, signed up, paid to meet my fundraiser goal (I really wanted a t-shirt) and went to do the survivor lap but everyone was still parking their cars and we were late so I walked by myself. There were a few ladies that befriended me immediately during our lap so I walked with them. It's amazing how close you can get to someone in such a short period of time when you have cancer in common. Now if I were to do it right, I would have had a team and we would have relay walked around the track all day and night and camped out...next time! Then Maggie invited me to her relay for life in Puyallup and she did it right, she had a great team, an awesome tent, did the camping out and her family even had t-shirts made that said "I'm in 4 Maggie", of course Seahawks fans! So I did the survivor lap with Maggie and her family and that was fun. At this point I have lost all my eyelashes and my eyebrows are almost gone, so makeup has become my best friend. Oh how I miss those days where I could just walk out the door without any makeup, but for that you need eyelashes and eyebrows, you don't realize how important they are to your face until you lose them! I also had the most amazing friend, although I have a great deal of amazing friends (you are all amazing and you know who you are), bring me thai food from Seattle, of course he didn't stop there, he brought groceries and a variety of drinks and dessert from my favorite bakery, he had to have made 10 stops and drove it all down to me in gig harbor. So sweet, I can't believe there are people like him out there, but I'm not surprised, he is an awesome person.

The Last of the Red Sunshine (5/28/2014)

So today is the last of the so call Red Devil (adriamycin), I call it the Red Sunshine because that is how it is referred to in a book I read called "the Red Sunshine" written by a physician who battled stage 3 breast cancer who lives in Seattle. So I prefer to call it the red sunshine. Anyway, its over, and that was suppose to be the worst of the chemo regimen. This last treatment was a week delayed because of the infection, but that is a small bump in the road.

I now will start 12 weeks of carboplatin and taxol. Apparently the worst that can happen with this is peripheral neuropathy (numbness and tingling in the hands and feet) which we hope is temporary but can be permanent. I'm not scared, let's do it!