Stage 3

After a very long day down at UT Southwestern on Friday, I'm very pleased to share that my scans came back negative for cancer spread to any other organs. It is a huge answer to prayer and another miracle in this journey! Thank you to everyone that prayed and fasted last week- your prayers were answered yet again.

To show you just how busy my day was Friday, here is a run-down of the schedule and procedures:

7AM – Arrived at UT Southwestern - Zale Lipshy Hospital to drink my barium sulfate. I had to drink two of these delicious milkshakes. My choices were banana, berry, or mochaccino. I chose berry first and I chose wrong. For my second I went to the mochaccino per the receptionist’s suggestion. It was better but I think it was because I was holding my nose while sipping the cool liquid chalk- yum.

8AM – They have to put “contrast” into your bloodstream while the CT scan is going so I got to have my port (the thing I had surgery for last week to implant that gives folks direct access to a vein) accessed for the first time. The needle they use is pretty scary looking so I was freaking out a little. I didn’t have the numbing cream for the port yet but the access line didn’t hurt too badly to insert. Yay!

8:30AM - CT scan of my abdomen and chest. When they put the contrast in the IV, it makes you feel like you are peeing in your pants. Sure glad the lady warned me. I would have been super embarrassed thinking I had just peed all over the CT machine!

10:00AM – Drove to another building on the campus and arrived 30 minutes before my next appointment. Who should I see sitting in the waiting room but a minister from our church - the same minister who called the day I was diagnosed asking if there was anything she could pray for, just happened to be there taking a family member to an appointment! She's also the same minister who visited us in the hospital when David was born.  I’ve honestly stopped being surprised when “coincidences” like this occur. It was wonderful getting to chat with her and having her pray for me in the waiting room. God is so good!

10:30AM – Was injected with radioactive something-or-other in preparation for my bone scan. They keep it in a lead container. Looks scary, right?

11:00AM – Drove to yet another building on campus for my genetics appointment. It is wild what they can find out and tell you about gene mutations in your DNA! I’m having 25 genes evaluated for mutations; two of them are BRCA1&2. These will tell me whether I’m likely to have ovarian or a second breast cancer. If this comes back positive I will most likely have the other breast and my ovaries removed. Other genes would say whether I’m likely to have any number of other types of cancer. This lets me know if I should have increased screenings down the road.

I thought this appointment was going to be scary but it turned out to just be ridiculously interesting. I love science! They have models that spit out the likelihood of being BRCA1or2 positive. Because I don’t have any family history of cancer, it gave me only a 7% chance. If my mom had been diagnosed with breast cancer at age 50, it would be a 33% chance (I asked her to go re-run the model with different parameters, just because I thought it was cool.) J

12:30PM – Took a shuttle this time to get back to the first building for the bone scan. The bone scan took a pretty long time. I had to lay absolutely still, in silence, for 45 minutes with a big piece of metal a centimeter from my face. I just ended up praying the whole time and making a mental list of all the things I want to do after I beat cancer…I see a future blog post forming…

2:00PM – Walked back to the final building for my lab work. It is so easy to draw blood with a port. I’m liking this port more and more!

3:00PM – The moment of truth! I had the same feeling of anticipation I used to get before semester grades came out or when you are about to find out whether or not you got into a school. And, as crazy as it sounds, I really like that feeling. I had such a peace the entire day. I was honestly just really excited about finding out for sure that I didn’t have metastatic cancer. I was so confident that that would be the result. In fact, I was so confident that I offered to go to the results appointment by myself. Brad insisted on coming so he was with me when we met with the oncologist.

My doctor told me that the test results looked good. But then she said they had found a 1-2 mm spot on my lungs and I started crying. She quickly reassured me that everyone has spots like that on their organs and that it isn’t cancer. She said they would never try and biopsy a spot like that and that we would just make sure it wasn’t growing next time we do a scan. I also had a “very tiny nonspecific spot that would not be considered metastatic” on my liver. Again, this is just that everyone has stuff on their organs.

It was evident how well my doctor already knows me, since she walked me through each imaging report line-by-line.  After each line, she would turn and look directly at me, saying some variant of "that's totally normal", or "that is not cancer", or "don't freak out".  I think she suspected (and Brad can confirm) that without that level of explanation I would have read the reports later and phrases like "very tiny nonspecific spot" would get translated by my brain to read: "very cancer nonspecific CANCER".  Thankfully my doctor cares enough to spend the time with me to pre-empt those doubts - I'm very thankful for that.

So officially the scans did not find metastatic cancer in my body. I’m stage 3! I debate on whether I’m 3B or 3C because the lymph node above my collar bone is no longer there (which would be 3B) but I know it was there to begin with (3C) except that we don’t know for sure whether or not it was cancerous (it was never biopsied). I don’t think it makes a big difference either way on B or C though.

I asked the oncologist what percent prognosis I had but she didn’t want to give me numbers saying that those are interesting when you are giving a talk on your research, but that she doesn’t do percent survival rates for individual patients. She said for me they are going to fight this and get it out of me and that we will beat it. Period.

I have seen research from MD Anderson on a more recent 30-year study that says the 5-year survival rate is about 50% for non-metastatic inflammatory breast cancer. That rate goes up to 73% if you have a complete response. Which in my mind I’m wondering what happens to the 27% of patients that have all the cancer completely out of their body after just chemo, that then they die of cancer before the 5 years are up? I guess it comes back and they aren’t able to keep it at bay?

So flip a coin and that is the probability of me being here in 5 years. Honestly, I’ll take it at this point.  Compared with some of the other stats I’ve seen along the way, 50% sounds like a dream- a very doable dream.

Guns up- let’s do this!