Good News!

This post is horribly overdue. The reasons why may be the subject of a future blog post.

January 20th I received round three of four rounds of chemo. You may recall that I'm doing chemo prior to surgery, and halfway through I was going to have an MRI to assess how the tumor was responding to chemo - that way, if the tumor wasn't shrinking I could receive a different chemo drug combination.

So, a few days prior to receiving round three I had my MRI. On the 20th, I met with my doctor prior to the chemo, to learn that, not only had the tumor responded to chemo by shrinking, it had shrunk to essentially NOTHING! There was no enhancement (taking up of contrast by the tumor's own network of blood vessels, the red flag in the original MRI), no measurable size, just some scarring where the tumor had previously been.

What does this mean as far as treatment goes? No changes - I stay on the same drugs, will still receive four rounds, still have surgery (they'll remove the same amount of tissue that they would have had we done surgery prior to chemo), still have about seven weeks of radiation. But my prognosis is just that much better.

I continue to feel good through the chemo, with my biggest complaint being the bone pain from the neulasta shot. It's been getting a bit tough mentally - even with the excellent news from the MRI, as we turn the corner from winter and I can look forward to spring, I have a lot of treatment ahead of me yet. I'm just ready to be done - ready to put it all behind me, to have weeks without doctor appointments, for my hair to grow back. To be done and go back to normal.