Breaking News

There was a message on my cell phone yesterday afternoon from my oncologist telling me that she had some good news for me--tests had been done to the pleural fluid that had been drawn from my lungs and some other tests and that it had been determined that the cancer is HER2 positive. This used to be very, very bad news for women as it represents a very aggressive form of breast cancer that used to have a very poor survival rate. With the advent of a targeted therapy, called Herceptin, survival outcomes have moved to very poor to--well I'm not sure if better than average--but certainly much better than they were.

For some reason I cried when I heard her message and not in that happy, I'm so lucky way. I'm not sure why. Perhaps because I have just gotten my head around the current as-soon-as-I-get-the-you're-next-on-the-wait-list call from the Cancer Agency chemo desk and now I need to get with a new program.

Dipping back into the Internet's murky pond of data regarding cancer and its treatment options, survival chances etc. is not for the faint of heart. One of the infuriating things to read about are the medical studies that compare one cytotoxic drug to another and then conclude that one is "superior" because on average the patients in one arm of the study had 9.3 months to disease progression versus the other arm that had 7.9 months (don't worry Mom, these aren't my stats). Call me a limited thinker but I'm hard-pressed to get giddy over an additional 1.4 months--especially if the drug procotol involves six months of chemo that render the recipient pukishly-baldedly-cane-walking-muscle-angstedly sick (again, not necessarily true in my case). On the bright side, there's also some humour available. Apparently Herceptin is contraindicated if one is allergic to Chinese hamster ovary. Actually now that I think about it maybe that's not funny, maybe that means that I'm going to have Chinese hamster ovaries injected into me.

Time to have some green tea and work on upping my gratitude attitude.