Getting close

One left.  At long last, I only have one hard chemo and its recovery to go.  This will be my ninth chemotherapy for this cancer, 15th chemotherapy lifetime, and it will occur on August 22nd.  Can you hear the trumpets and fanfare?  I almost can.

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In the meantime, I have plenty of resting and strength-building to do.  Good thing it's been pretty much the most awesome midwestern summer in recent memory.  I just love being outdoors with my kids, family, and friends.  I do a lot of walking around the neighborhood with various of these comrades.  It's good for strength-building, among other things.

Tomorrow my dad is driving me to my other Cancer Center for appointments with Dr. Medical Oncologist (the Her2 cancer expert) and Dr. Pulmonary Oncologist.  I am looking forward to the trip for the following reasons:  1) it'll be awesome to spend a day with my dad, 2) we're going to try a new Indian restaurant for lunch, 3) I'm hopeful I'll finally learn what further treatments are in store for me after my last taxotere on August 22nd.  

It was just Dr. O and me at my usual appointment with her this past Friday.  After the exam, I told her I was excited for my appointments tomorrow.  It's true, I am.  Knowledge is power.  I'm ready to come up with a plan and execute it.  Her response, however, was discomfiting.  She chuckled, saying she's glad I'm excited about the appointments because she's nervous.  Nervous?!?!  Why would she be nervous?  It turns out that the treatment path forward is unclear to her as well.  To be clear, she has ideas (more than I have!), but there's no protocol for precisely what to do with my and my cancer(s).  I suppose she's nervous about what further treatments these other experts will suggest.  Or perhaps she's worried about whether or not any of the plans will work for me.  Who knows.  Clearly she knows more about what could happen to me than I do.  All I know is that I am a helluva long way from deathly ill, and I seem to be moving in the right direction (chemotherapy side-effects notwithstanding), so I'm not going to worry about those things yet.  

At the end of this conversation I said well, at least I can count on a mastectomy in my not-so-distant future.  Here's where she threw me curveball.  At the breast cancer conference she attends every year, new research was presented showing that patients with metastatic disease (that's me and my lungs) do WORSE when the primary cancer (that's my breast cancer) is surgically removed.  To say this another way, patients with metastatic disease do BETTER when the site of the primary cancer is kept in place.  Can you believe it?  No one yet knows the mechanism for how this counter-intuitive phenomenon can be, but it just might mean that I'll continue to be lopsided rather than breastless.  Cool!  

I suppose, then, it becomes important to have confidence with the conclusion of metastatic disease.  Boy am I glad that I'm seeing a pulmonary oncologist tomorrow.  I have my PET scan disks in my bag. 

In the meantime...Just keep healing, just keep healing, healing, healing, healing.