Having overcome the abdominal pan and infection, I restarted weekly Paclitaxel chemo on Wednesday of last week. I persuaded them to change the anti sickness medication from something long acting, to something less all-encompassing. I hadn’t had a moment’s nausea in any of the treatment so far, so this seemed an easy trade off to reduce the risk of constipation. It worked like a dream - no nausea, and to my huge relief, fairly normal bowels all through the week. So I managed to stay out of the hospital with my pre-chemo bloods showing infection markers back down to normal.
I still found Paclitaxel a fairly unpleasant experience. 2 days where I had had little sleep and had steroid buzzing, followed by 2 days of aching flu-like muscles, followed by a day with next to no energy. By Tuesday, I was largely back to normal but it was time to go for blood tests ready for today’s date in the oncology day unit. So infusion 3 is now in and I hope that I am slightly more acclimatised. Otherwise it’s going to be a long 8 weeks to get this done if I am wiped out in various ways 5 days out of 7 and have hospital visits on the 2 good days. Taste wasn’t quite such an issue as it had been on EC which I guess is a bonus.
Still no word on the results from the CT scan. They weren’t back when I had my onco review at the beginning of last week. I presume they will contact me if there’s anything of note, otherwise I have another onco review a week on Monday. I had been slightly surprised when the CT scan operator said they were going to do a chest, abdomen, pelvis (CAP) scan, as I had thought they were only going to scan my abdomen. The letter to the GP, which I was copied on, explained all. Essentially, I have a high risk cancer (grade 3 TNBC), and whist my sentinel lymph nodes were clear, there was vascular invasion in my tumour. The vascular invasion is is why I agreed to have chemo. So the letter indicates they requested a full CAP scan for cancer staging purposes as well as for ruling diverticulitis in or out. This makes sense given they were going to scan my abdomen anyway. However the full cancer staging aspect hadn’t been mentioned before the CT (the closest they got was saying they didn’t expect to find anything “sinister”) and I am now not sure how I feel, or whether I would have consented had I known their full intent. On the one hand this is an opportunity to spot anything else that I didn’t know was there whilst it’s potentially treatable. At almost 6 months since surgery, if I have had microscopic secondaries and the chemo hasn’t been effective, these might now be big enough to be seen. On the other hand I have seen many people write about having what turn out to be needless biopsies and investigations chasing shadows and other things found on the scan. It’s unfortunately brought a bit of fear and worry into my life that I didn’t already have.
