So our blood is made in our bone marrow. The drugs I'm on as well as my cancer in my bones, affect my bone marrow, so I've been going weekly for blood draws to check my white blood cell counts.
They've been holding steady. I'm on my off week of ibrance chemo right now and he checked my counts as well as looked at my counts from last Friday......which was at the end of my 3 weeks on. My counts are doing really well, which means my bone marrow is doing really well.
So I don't have to go for weekly blood draws anymore.....just at my monthly appointments.
I did get an infusion of Zometa which is a bone strengthener. I will do this once every 3 months. The reason for this is that as a tumor clings to a bone, it sends out stuff that eat away at the bone around it. As the tumors shrink, I could be left with holes in my bones that will make it easy to fracture them. The Zometa is supposed to help the bone heal faster and regrow itself. They use this same stuff for Osteoporosis.
I went into the chemo room and just couldn't look at the people sitting in those chairs. Luckily they took me in the back to some different chairs and I sat for a half an hour with an i.v.
I have been told that at some point, chemo will be used for me. I just can't look at those chairs yet. They scare me.
We finally got to see the images from my PET scan. I have so many more spots than I even imagined. I was trying to be generous and say maybe I have 20 spots, but there's more. Too many to count. And those are only the ones that the scan can pick up. It's everywhere.
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| This is one picture of me from the back. All the white spots are cancer.....the bright ones and the not so bright ones......except for my brain and for the big white spot at the bottom, that's my bladder. He was rotating it while I snapped the photo, so it's kind of not very clear and it's only the back. It doesn't show the ones in the front or sides. |
TDr. Esplin took another look and feel of my breast and lymph nodes. The good news is that it's looking and feeling so much better and he can only feel the one really huge lymph node and it's definitely smaller. As he pressed on my spine and ribs where I have a gazillion lesions, there was no pain. I still have pain in my legs and in my shoulder blade and in my chest.
He sounded quite optimistic that the drugs are working. I was happy about that.
We asked him about my tumor markers. The thing about tumor markers is that if they're reliable, they're helpful. If they're not, then they're not.
Certain proteins from tumors get released into the blood and the blood tests check for this protein. As the number goes up, it means that there are more tumors OR that a tumor is getting bigger. If the numbers go down, the tumors are shrinking or disappearing. However, tumors are very smart suckers and they mutate so the proteins change and that makes the tumor markers in the blood unreliable. The only true way to know if cancer is progressing or regressing is scans.
Dr. Esplin wants me to be on 3 full rounds of ibrance before they do another scan. So I thought I was going to get one mid June, but he wants to wait until late June or early July. sigh
As tumors shrink and I'm left with just a couple, I will probably get radiation on those and probably regular chemo at some point.
I asked for more clarification about why no surgery and why no hysterectomy. Pretty much got the same explanation.....neither one will help much now that I'm stage 4 and doing those will cause me more trouble and not really help. I also learned that ibrance is better than i/v/ chemo. If this was me 5 years ago, I would be on regular i.v. chemo, no doubt. ibrance is only about 5 years out from being FDA approved. Studies are currently being done are other stage cancers to see if ibrance will help them. I guess when they test a drug, they go backwards from stage 4.
He said that after the testing, which takes 5 + years, if ibrance and others, show to work on other stages, then regular chemo could become a thing of the past. This would be really great news for everyone. ibrance and these targeted chemo's are so much easier on people. Not everyone tolerates them as well as I am, but there's still so much less side effects than the other chemo.
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