Titty Gate

I will tell you something that can possibly be attributed any away that you believe… fear, paranoia, intuition… I have for most of my life always “known” many things before they came to fruition. If you’ve intimately followed my life the last 2 years, you know that my faith in the universe and our inner abilities is something I believe very strongly in. And so I will tell you, I have known this whole time this is where we were going.

And when I say this whole time, I mean when I found lumpy. I just knew. I was not surprised when I had my mammo and they told me I needed a biopsy. Was it scary and upsetting, of course but I knew. I knew it was cancer. I knew I would have surgery and I knew… I would have chemo. I actually told the doctor when she delivered the “news” to me Wednesday that I thought she was crazy when she told me previously there was a possibility of me not having it.

Here is the other thing that I knew and know. I will be fine.

This is probably going to suck a lot for a variety of different reasons. The hair thing is honestly the toughest for me to swallow. I love my hair, I do not think I will be cute bald, and I hate short hair on me. I am going to sob when it starts falling out, it will be traumatic and that will most likely be the moment I am the most angry throughout this. But… this too shall pass.

Perspective… as I was sitting in the waiting room for an annoyingly long amount of time for them to check my blood pressure before I saw Dr Katz, I was scrolling through my phone looking for pictures of me and my cousin to post for her 30th birthday. My favorite is one of us where I am 16 and she is 5 and she’s sitting on my lap at a carnival. And it occurred to me… that moment seems so far away and yet like yesterday at the same time. It is a memory of another time. A time that seems like it was someone else’s life. And it struck me how quickly 25 years went by. And I thought to myself, this is 6 months to 1 year of my life. Before I know it, this too, will be a memory of another time. Another life.

If I live to be 90 years old, I will have lived 32,850 days. 365 of that is nothing. I sit here thinking about the week I was recovering from surgery and how I felt like garbage and here I am not 2 weeks later and I feel completely different. It was over so quick. If I approach chemo with this mindset, I think I will be ok.

It’s 5 months. That’s nothing.

So here is the plan:

June 17th- the Port is placed in for treatment. I expressed my displeasure that the port is going in on the opposite side of lumpy’s former residence as I really would have liked to keep all scars on the same side lol Dr Katz enjoys my humor. I also asked her if chemo would make my ear/scalp eczema go away bc “that will not look cute if I have no hair” to which she could not stop laughing at me. It will make my eczema go away. 1 in the Pros column.

June 24th- we begin. I will have an echocardiogram beforehand to get a baseline on my heart as one of the medications can cause cardiotoxicity and I already have my Zofran pills for any nausea at home.

There will be 4 cycles of Adriamycin 60 mg/m2 and cytoxan 600 mg/m2 every 2 weeks (6/24, 7/8, 7/22, 8/5) with Neulasta to keep my white blood cell count high to fight infection. These sessions will be 3 hour appointments.

Then we switch to Taxol 80 mg/m2 weekly for 12 weeks which I believe begins on 8/19 which takes us to 11/4 for the last dose.

I will also get Aloxi 0.25 mg IV and Emend 150 mg IV with every cycle to help with the nausea and decadron 10 mg IV for nausea and inflammation. These sessions will be 1 hour appointments.

I am extremely blessed to have not 1 but 2 amazing employers who are willing to make adjustments for me that will hopefully be beneficial to my healing process and still maintain my role in the businesses. If I reach a point in all of this where that is no longer the case… we will cross that bridge if we get to it.