I have breast cancer. It’s still difficult to say out loud. My appointment with Dr Kennedy was on March 20. There were a couple reasons I liked the idea of going to see her. First of all, she’s been through this BC journey herself. In addition, I like that her office is in Fortuna. Something about being closer to home makes it seem a little less rough.
During the appointment with her, we mostly talked about the treatment plan. She had a copy of the pathology report with showed my BC to be “triple positive” and pretty aggressive. This means that it's estrogen-receptor positive, progesterone-receptor positive, and HER2 positive. The tumor in the breast is approximately 1.5cm and the one in the lymph nodes is about 1.3cm, which puts me at Stage 2. Because of the lymph node involvement, Dr Kennedy said I’d need chemo. This was tougher to hear than the actual BC diagnosis. Chemo scares the shit out of me. She said 4-6 rounds of harsh chemo, then 10-12 rounds of much less harsh chemo— with lumpectomy and radiation mixed in there too. It would be about a year long for all the treatments. I really prefer to do lumpectomy rather than a mastectomy.
Another thing we did at the appointment was genetic testing (saliva based) to see if I carry the gene mutations that can cause cancer. Those results take 3-4 weeks. She also ordered a CT/PET scan to rule out any cancer spread beyond the lymph nodes.
She said it normally takes 3-4 weeks to get all the testing done, port insertion surgery done, and insurance approval before we can start chemo. That would be put us right about the time we would be going to Anaheim for the FFA State Conference so we decided to get chemo scheduled for end of April, beginning of May. Because it would be about 6 weeks, she suggested starting me on a drug called Tamoxifen. It should stop any tumor growth and it is something I’ll have to be on for about 10 years after treatment is done.
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