A Rough Week

The last day I posted was Tuesday and I had started feeling better, so much so that I thought I had made it through the hard part of this round. Boy, was I wrong! Today is Sunday and now I'm starting to think I'm improving. I hope. This round of chemo was much worse than #1. And I'm not just talking about the bone pain, even though that was worse too.

Tuesday night after I had written the last blog, I started getting the horrible stomach/intestinal cramps that I had the last go round. I tried taking the Bentyl that Dr. G. prescribed but I either wasn't taking it right or it wasn't working for me. The next morning they started up again but with more problems... that I won't get into here. But I called and reported those to the oncologist. They sent me to the ER. After a few hours of minor tests in the ER, it looked like something that could heal itself at home. However, when they did my bloodwork it came back with low blood levels. Not low enough for a transfusion thankfully, but low. And my white blood count was extremely low. Which would explain why I felt so weak and tired. So I needed to monitor myself for a fever over 100.0 and take other precautions for low WBC.

The rest of the week I've just taken it easy and tried to regain some strength. I've had a headache every day from Wednesday on. A side effect of low blood? I don't know. My taste buds have disappeared. I had the sore mouth and bleeding gums for a couple of days. My eye has been twitching all week. Talk about annoying. But these are just the minor things. I've just been discouraged after such a rough week. It literally took me two hours to work up to going to the ER. After the chest tube incident I didn't want to go back there. And it went okay. But I just didn't want to acknowledge additional problems either.

There were a couple days this week when I wondered how I would make it through four more rounds of this when it is cumulative. It builds up in you and it gets rougher every time. It's less than two weeks until my next round and I've yet to have a really good day. That's why they tell you to take it ONE day at a time. If you think about more than that, it gets overwhelming. Mom ran into my doc and he talked about lowering my chemo drug levels so it won't wipe out my blood count like it did this time. That would help me get through all the treatments, I hope. I meet with him on Wednesday so I'll know more then.

There was a Patient Education on Triple Negative Breast Cancer on Discovery Health yesterday morning. They profiled 5 women with TNBC like me. Wow. Because TNBC is one type of BC that doesn't have a specific treatment plan (like hormone therapy, etc.) chemo is the most relied upon treatment. They are doing clinical trials to try to come up with a specific treatment for TNBC. One of the main thing they emphasized is that once you start chemo, you don't delay treatment and you finish all your scheduled treatments. It was hard to hear some of the stories of the women who had been through and are going through TNBC, especially while going through it now. It is more prevalent in young women and in African-American women. It made me reconsider the BRCA test. I still don't know if I want to do it now, but I don't think I would put the test off forever.