Good days, scary moments - chemo here I come
The last two weeks have flown with so many medical appointments (blood tests, ultrasound, bone scan, ct scan, surgeon check up, physiotherapy, lymphoedema education, chemo education, pap smear), school open nights for my eldest son, buying hats and looking at wigs and last but not least working on the odd few days that I was free!
I was doing fine when I went for my abdominal ultrasound and rocked up to the bone scan thinking "great they are running early I should get more shopping in afterwards" but then the nice young man asked if I had ever had a knock to the head. Then he said he wanted a side scan of my skull, then he said there was a legion they were looking at. Then I went to the waiting room and wrote 'Now I am scared' in my journal and my eyes filled with tears. I thought to my self 'Here I am stressing about losing my hair and maybe I will be losing part of my head (or worse)! Ten minutes later they called me back in for a three dimensional CT scan of my skull. I don't do confined spaces very well (I think due to a scarey moment while caving in my youth) so with my eyes closed tight, counting my rapid breaths and trying hard to not think any more about what this meant I lay still for the required ten minutes. I then spent the next four hours shopping in a daze waiting for the results to be ready. I rang a 24 hour support line but they didn't pick up (rang me back 4 days later with apologies) so I finally rang my 'second-mum' at work for some comforting words and advice. I raced back to get the results asking for them to be faxed through to my oncologist, tore them open in the car and (phew) they didn't read so bad. I then rang my oncologists rooms and she rang me back at 5.30 to say that the bone lesion looked entirely friendly. She said that I had probably always had it, it is too small to biopsy and unlikely to be breast cancer related. Her recommendation is for another scan in 6 - 12 months. Thank God that this all happened over only one day, by the end of the day I was totally drained but at least I had some positive news to go home with.
I took the next day of work (to recover) and went to a voluteer run head gear shop at the local hospital and met the most amazing three women. They are all breast cancer survivors. After the first ten minutes we were chatting like old friends, nearly wetting our selves laughing (I look like Fatty Vaughtan as a Woman in some wigs) and after many hours I left with a spring in my step and a bag full of hats, turbans and freebies and the confidence that I can come out the other end of this and be just as vital and vibrant as they are.
I start TC chemo day 1 cycle 1 tomorrow but although I am not looking forward to it feel that I am pretty well prepared. My hats and turbans are ready, I have had my hair cut short, the house is unusually clean and my supermum is primed to provide heaps of support.
Tonight I discovered that as I havent painted my toe nails since I was probably 16 (I have toes that I am not keen to highlight) I am a complete failure at it. My toes also seem to have gotten a lot further away than I remember!. I resorted to a kind of blobby stab at the top part of each toe which seems to have done the trick. When purchasing my dark nail polish I decided to not go with boring black but purchased 'No Shrinking Violet' - a suitable name I thought for how I want to pass the next 12 weeks and a suitably dark gothic sparkly purple. So with my new nails, new hair and inspiration from the many women I have met over the last 2 weeks who have said 'By the way, I am a breast cancer survivor' I am ready to embark on the next step of this journey. My next post may not be so positive as I will lose my lovely new hair style sometime in the next three weeks but for now life is good - naive or not I am thinking I will get through this!
