Moving on…….

After a rough January, I was happy in the past couple of weeks to start feeling much better, even great. Two years and nine months ago, I received the initial diagnosis of this cancer. Out of no where. I felt great and healthy when I went into the doctors for that first mammogram and felt great when I was told that I had Stage IV, end stage, incurable breast cancer. This past Wednesday morning I went into Dana Farber feeling great for my routine scans. I was eerily calm and the whole morning moved along quickly, everything on time and without a hitch. Except for my minor freak out in the bone scan machine.

As I sat waiting for the doctor to come into the room to review my results I felt calm. Confident that my scans would show that I am still stable, the same as my last scans at the end of October. It’s funny b/c as soon as the oncologist comes in the room, you can tell immediately what is about to be said.

Well for me, the time has come to move on from my first treatment regimen as it has been found that my cancer has now spread to my liver. This news devastates me. I am not quite sure why this is happening to me. Why I am allowed to feel great while deep within my body there is constant havoc. I am nervous that now instead of having disease that has only spread to my bones, I now have disease that has spread to my bones and my liver. I feel sucker punched. I feel defeated. I am angry with myself that I allowed this cancer diagnosis to become “normal” in my life. That I felt that I could stay on that initial treatment forever. I am not sure why this is happening to me but I ask myself all the time what I could have possible done to be punished this way. Why my family is being punished. Why my kids will never know a time when there mom did not have this disease and was not sick.

I was offered to become part of a study at DFCI as my next treatment plan. There are three “arms” to this study and a computer selects at random which arm I am chosen for. All three arms are good options for me but there is one that we are really hopeful that I am chosen for. So please if you are reading this, you must know/care for me and my family, please say a prayer or make a wish that we are selected for this choice. I will know within the next week and report to DFCI on February 27th to start the next chapter of this disease.

To say I am scared is an understatement. I am scared, sad, angry and right now feeling really sorry for myself. To get used the side effects of the medication I have been on for the past few years was a lot and I am nervous to see how these new meds will make me feel.

I was unsure if I wanted to share this news and to be honest have not been quite ready for the past few days. For the past few days, except for doing things that I had to do, or tried to do to make life normal for the kids, I feel like I am falling deeper and deeper into a dark hole of my own emotions. I decided this morning, after I have been sitting on the couch for hours, that I wanted to write this post, share my feelings and release them. I am going to try my hardest to work myself out of this not so great place and try to accept this thing that I really cannot change.