Hello all!

Post chemo treatment #2 of this cycle and so far I still have hair! 
This chemo is called Eribulin, and it's a new one to me. I'm still not clear on how it is determined which kinds should be used and when, but at this point, it's kind of a crapshoot and I'm not so concerned as I was the first go around. The side effects aren't as terrible as some of the chemo I have had in the past (yet! you never know with this stuff) and I think the goal is to keep them minimal since the plan here is permanent care. Initially, when they're trying to cure you of your cancer, there is an end date to the chemo, a time where your body can recover, so they hit you week after week to aggressively get that shit out of there. Since now a cure is no longer an option the plan is to treat the cancer as long as we can, which involves lower doses of toxins and more time off in between. When I did my taxol and my carboplatin chemos it was week after week after week for 12 and 11 cycles. With this chemo, we are doing two weeks in a row and then a week off. I even ASKED to please not skip a week- I want RELIEF from my respiratory symptoms. That isn't really an option though. My doctor believes that if we were to push on ahead it would hurt me in the long run since eventually my blood counts would get too low for me to carry on with these treatments in the future. So, we wait. 

I spent the last weekend in the hospital after having some really painful difficulties breathing. I went into the ER after I woke up and couldn't take even the tiniest inhale without excruciating pain. It was something else- and I have BEEN in PAIN before. I like to think I'm not a wimp. This pain was scary though, so in we went. I was checked for PE and the usual suspects and thankfully I didn't have any life-threatening issues. I developed pleuritis (an inflammation of the pleura lining around the lungs and thoracic cavity) that was causing me pain from coughing so much. Spent a few days in the hospital, was spoiled rotten by my 7 East coworkers, and got a bronchoscopy. I'll get the results of that on Monday but from what I can tell from my results in my patient portal there is no additional infection or anything else causing these issues- just the damn tumors. 

The plan for right now is to beat back some of the cancer with this chemo, and then we will reassess what to do next depending on how this goes. When I said it's kind of a crapshoot- it really is. There is not a specific plan of action right now like the first time. My doctors think this will be the best thing to start me on so that is what we are doing- but there is no way to know if this stuff is working until either my symptoms get better or worse. Otherwise, we will scan again in three months to see if the tumors are growing/shrinking/or stable. The tumor on my liver has doubled in size within a month from CT scan to CT scan. It wasn't that big to begin with (~1.5 cm) so this isn't like a huge crisis, but still discouraging that they're being allowed to just grow away and I'll have to give the chemo time to work before we can make any determinations on if we need to try something different. Hopefully, this will do what it is supposed to, along with the hormone suppression, and the tumors will at the very least stop growing/spreading. 

For my breathing right now I'm on just about all the possible treatments I can be- or at least that have been made available to me. Not a lot to do when the source is the tumors and the tumors are being addressed with the chemo. Here's hoping that I'll be back to breathing normally asap, and that I will continue to tolerate this chemo well! 

-Kate