My friend, Debbie, in Texas, sent me a display of flowers that are still blooming, when I was down under, sick and low for two weeks. They are so pretty. Thank you, Debbie. Suzanne in NYC rescued the day by closing my mastectomy wound. I will explain below. Thank you so much, Suzanne.
I am committed to three infusions of taxotere, three weeks apart, which begin two days from now, and to, simultaneously, begin a year of herceptin infusions every three weeks. I have also committed to the port-a-catheter, possibly that morning.
This last round of chemo marked the end of FEC chemo for me (the nausea/hair loss/fatigue chemo) and I slept and felt nauseated for two whole weeks after it. Was just too sick (despite hundreds of dollars of the good anti-nausea drug, paid by Joanna and Ellen), too tired to get out of bed much, and too mentally foggy to cope with much responsibility at all. My first two rounds meant a week in bed after each.
The one week where I felt normal, despite fatigue, this past one, was amazing. I was at Bruce Pit walking dogs everyday and had a ball in the autumn sunshine.
I had a great time with my friends. Saturday night, when Dave took the boys, Bucky and Eiger, on a canoe camping trip, and Bobbi and I got to be girly girls, with treats and cuddles, and when Dawn, Christine, and Courtenay came over for a fun party, I was so happy I forgot all about the chemo and the cancer. Kept my blond wig on all evening and we were four blondes having fun. Dawn turns out to have almost been my sister's niece. It turns out her uncle and my sister were engaged for a few years, decades ago. I recall the Norris family from when they used to live around the corner from us, growing up. I have loved Dawn and known her for a year and a half and never figured that out before. Saturday night Dawn read the angel cards for us three, and I could not get over how accurate they were.
Dave has been much better, too. Much less negativity in the air.
Another great thing about the week of good health was that I started to use the HER2 website and became online friends with a couple of super Her2 friends, Denise and Nancy. I started upping my prayer program with a morning reflection/prayer that comes from an American website too.
Monday morning I researched what I was in for during the next nine weeks when taxotere is my chemo treatment. What I learned scared the devil out of me. I will reprint it here for you. First is taxotere side effects and how Denise managed to mitigate some of the effects, and secondly I will reprint the herceptin effects. I will put these at the bottom of the blog.
I have never committed to anything in my life before that I could not back out of. You all know the attempts to escape finishing chemo. I explained those attempts a coupla blogs ago and how the resident talked me out of it. What you don't know is that not long after I was strong and I recommitted to chemo while my health was good for that one week, the past week.
You know well how hard I tried to avoid the port in my chest. The veins in my left arm appear bruised under the surface and the left arm smarted to touch the week after chemo. Trouble is, is that it hasn't healed. Still smarts to touch and is still bruised. So. I saw Paul, my oncologist, Friday, and we both decided I had to do it. Those veins do not appear strong enough to handle more chemo. My mastectomy wound, however, thanks to Suzanne in New York City, has been receiving powdered fungal medicine, which she kindly Fedexed to me, has finally closed. Home visiting nurse, Chantal, thanks you, Suzanne, as do I. How wonderful is Suzanne!!! There is a really ugly scar in the shape of maroon big lips on either side of where the incision opened, however.
I feel like I am in a surreal situation. Commitment phobia was always my weakness as a younger woman. Never wanted to be "trapped" like my mom was for her whole life. Always had a back up plan. I have a couple of reflections on this. First, I ended up trapped anyway, in terms of my marriage and happiness, despite two adult decades of being a commitmentphobe. Why? Because we always replicate our parents' decisions? Is there free will? Are our decisions always in reaction to those of our parents or mirroring them? I really have to say that for me the jury is still out on nature/nurture and free will when it comes to mating and decisions like that. I have no assurance that pretty well anything we do is from free will. How many murderers, thieves, philanderers, for example, have you met or heard of who didn't have a father just like them? Do we know how much is environment and how much is in the genes? I have no idea.
My surreal situation is that I cannot just back out of chemo. I have to go through it. I have always been a quitter when things got too rough. I am not really made of the stuff that perseveres. Mind you, there is evidence to the complete contrary. Dave can attest that I have spent many an overnite finishing a scene in my script, or debugging our computer, or getting a contrary software program such as a marks program for high school teachers, to make sense. I just don't give up in those situations. I always persevere into the wee hours, loading thirty thousand songs into an ipod in the strange and specific way I enjoy...tailored playlists.
So in conclusion, yes, I am capable of perseverance. I have a Master's thesis to prove it. But as I mentioned a couple of blogs ago, I am completely against being kitted out with a port in my upper chest like a pre-death hospital patient.
Freedom and Responsibility. Everytime I have found myself in a canoe in a provincial park in the wild I start reflecting on it. I sing while paddling, and get to go over all the songs, mostly Irish ballads, that I know all the complicated lyrics of. And reflecting on that while doing it, and how it rarely happens, the singing, in the real world, I always end up reflecting on Freedom versus Responsibility. We have to conform, behave, do the right thing, and we have to feel non-depressed while doing it. We have to feel there is a point to the nasty tasks.
Responsibility gives you the thing all people long for, a fellow I knew in my twenties, once said, "people want to be trusted, and to have some authority to carry out their designs and ideas." This is the golden side of responsibility. Freedom gives you the will to live. Sabotaging yourself can consist of erring too far either way. "You cannot kill the robber, Fancy, (imagination/freedom) lurking within", Dickens wrote, in Hard Times, "you can merely maim and distort him."
The Greeks were obsessed with warning of erring too far in either direction. Balance was the key. The Bacchanalians were honoured out of fear of repressing that which honoured the Id, as Freud later would call the animal drives that keep the human balanced and happy.
I think it is the Life Force, this Bacchanalian drive. "The green fuse that through the flower drives my death." A tangled agreement with mortality calls us to persevere through the gray mess of life, the freedoms, the fun, the duties, the responsibility.
Fear is the problem. Fear generates anxiety, which is handy when you need to get out of the clutches of a zealous Judy/nurse bent on installing a hole in your chest that may or may not ever be removed, depending on possible remote metastasis. Yes, I accept that I have behaved a tad irresponsibly avoiding the port. I got support from some HER2 breast cancer women on the international support website for staying away from a port, from ones who have managed years of distant metastases, and further chemo, further herceptin, all without a port. But others on there just said, it depends on your veins, on whether or not the epirubin, the E in FEC chemo, has been able to destroy them or not.
I created chaos in the nurses' scheduling of my port insertion, and setting up my fourth chemo. Am sure they hate me for this. I just got a call rebooking a missed appointment to talk to the cancer centre social worker for Friday, the day after my port installation, which is now scheduled for Thursday morning, while my chemo is now scheduled for that afternoon.
I have good news. I went to see Paul, as I said before, and he told me that a week ago the Government decided that Nupogen, a drug I have to inject into my belly for the ten days following each taxotere infusion, and for which a nurse will come and teach me, on Wednesday, how to do, will be free to those like me without extended health care. Normally, it would have cost me twenty five hundred dollars. Good news.
Ok. Here is, first, the discussion on the HER2 website on taxotere, followed by side effects from herceptin. I will be having herceptin for a whole year, and three infusions, three weeks apart, of taxotere. You will see why, last night, I lay awake experiencing fear, and a sort of helplessness most of the night. I just wanted to say no to further cancer treatment. Then I recalled that with this rare and aggressive kind of cancer I do not have the liberty to quit the treatment.
Before I print it out here from the website, I have to tell you an incredible thing I learned from Denise's oncologist, a researcher in Philadelphia. First, the majority of women in a poll on our support website, not only failed to discover their cancer till it was Stage 3 out of four stages, but had either false negative mammograms, or discovered it themselves at home, and not by mammogram at all. Denise's doctor said that it most likely has been growing in us quietly, lining the ducts in the breast, silently, undetected, for years. For years we have had breast cancer and not known it.
Thread title: Is pain normal with Taxotere
Hi Everyone..Need some advice.
Was given my first lot of Taxotere on Thursday,felt fine for a couple of days then bang the pain started.
The pain is unbareable. My finger tips feel like they have sharp shooting pains going through them,and my nails hurt as well. They are so sensitive. My whole body feels like i have been 10 rounds with a heavy weight boxer. My mouth is full of ulcers.
Taking my pain killers and mouth washes, and all other kinds of medication, but they are not easing any of this.
The lack of sleep is not good either..
Does anyone know how long this will last,or suffered similar symptoms after having Taxotere.
I can't take it anymore and it has only been a couple of days.
Claire x (in Coventry, UK)
__________________
21.06.11-Mammogram Biopsy Ultrascan
24.06.11-Told had Cancer of Right Breast
27.06.11-Confirmed HER2 & 2-3 Lumps in Lymphnodes.Awaiting MRI-CT-Mugger and Bone Scans.
05.07.11-Appt CT Neck-Abdo-Pelvis with contrast
08.07.11-Appt NM Cardiac Ventriculography Rest
11.07.11-Appt NM Bone Whole Body
13.07.11-Appt MRI Scan Breast's and Thorax
14.07.11-Chemo FEC..7 days GCSF Injections.
01.08.11-Consultant confirmed Scans show no Mets
04.08.11-Cycle 2 FEC
To Date.Had Cycle 3 of FEC and Herceptin.Now on Taxotere and Herceptin
Tumour shrunk from 9.5cm to 5.5cms.
#2
JennyB
Senior Member
Join Date: Apr 2011
Location: Townsville, Australia
Posts: 44
Re: Is pain normal with Taxotere
Hi Claire,
I too had taxotere and hated it!! I would get depressed and cry on day 4 like clockwork also had lots of headaches bone and muscle pain so much so persuaded my onc to have another full set of scans at the end of it. In hindsight wish I had waited for a while for that till the effects had gone. I also had finger pain but not so much in the finger nails.
Hang in there not long till its over
Jenny xx
__________________
Diagnosed Nov '10 IDC whilst pregnant with 2nd child
Her 2 ++ ER/PR + but weak and patchy 50% + 5%
Left mastectomy Dec '10, 6cm tumour 1 of 2 lymph (micro mets)
Clear margins but lymphovasculer invasion
Stage 3a Grade 3
Fec 100 x 3 Jan '11 Taxotere X 3 and Herceptin X 1yr
Staging scans - ct and bone - May '11 - NED!!
Start Femara - in chemo induced menapause
25 Rads June '11
Praying the Herceptin is as good as its hype!!
#3
NEDenise
Senior Member
Join Date: Aug 2011
Location: Philly Suburbs
Posts: 48
Re: Is pain normal with Taxotere
Claire,
I know just what you are talking about. I thought I'd go mad from the pain! Worse that labor! Worse than anything!
Told the onc after round one...she said "take the oxycodone on a schedule". Didn't help at all.
Long story short...after round 2...I told her I couldn't take it anymore...what other chemo is available. I'm stage 3, ER/PR neg...so she said she really, really wanted me to continue.
The new pain management plan...which worked pretty well...was:
Start taking 600mg of ibuprofen, every 6 hours, around the clock, on the day after chemo...even though nothing hurts yet. When the first hint of pain shows up, add the oxycodone, as prescribed, round the clock...whether you feel the pain or not. I was skeptical about taking the meds around the clock, regardless of pain...so I didn't at first. Yow! The pain came rushing back about 2 hours after the skipped dose! I never skipped another dose. After about 4 days...I was down to just the ibuprofen...then no pain meds. What a different experience. Without the pain, I was able to do all 4 rounds...no problem.
Just remember to take a stool softener and some senna...to keep things "regular".
Hope this helps! Oh...and I also had to take my temperature before I took the ibuprofen each time...to be sure there was no fever/neutropenia.
Good luck! You can do it!
Denise
__________________
Age at diagnosis 46
No family history of BC
12/26/10 found lump during BSE
1/11 - needle biopsy
2/11-Lumpectomy and axillary node dissection - Stage 3, ER/PR-, 14/17 nodes
3/11 - Post-op staph infection
4/11-A/C x 4, then Taxol/Herceptin x 4, Herceptin Q3 weeks for a year
8/26/11 finished last Taxol!!!
10/7/11 mastectomy and reconstruction
11/11 radiation x ?
“ Life is a grindstone, and whether it grinds you down or polishes you up is for you, and you alone, to decide. ”
– Cavett Robert
Side Effects of Herceptin
Herceptin only
I would like to hear from those who have had HERCEPTIN only with no chemo of any kind before or during treatment. I am a little more than 1/2 way through and have had very few side effects. These are some I've noticed:
. fingernails peel, crack , and split
. drippy nose - occasional , not related to any allergies or cold
. possible connection to bladder infections
I've had no fatigue
Re: Herceptin only
I have been on Herceptin only for a little over a year.Very little side effects,but I definitely have the finger nail issues.
Mom had the herceptin nose and bladder urgency.
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