Met with the surgeon at MD Anderson today. She agreed with KU that I will need chemo, surgery, then radiation. She reviewed my newest scans from yesterday and believes that four lymph nodes are now involved. Rather than just two. She also said she would stage me at a 2B rather than a 1B. So a lot depends on what the oncologist says on Tuesday. 

I got a phone call from Vivio this morning saying they denied my appeal to keep Perjeta on my chemo protocol. So now I am in the second appeal stage….. not that it is going to do any good. I don’t think anything I say or do or my doctors say or do is going to make them see me as anything more than a dollar sign. I gave the woman on the phone an earful. I wasn’t rude, but I told her that I am not a number! I am a person! A 39 year old person with a six-year-old daughter. And that because of them, I can’t get all of the medicine my doctor says I need to help save my life. I told them that I was at MD Anderson and it is the best cancer hospital in the United States and I was sure that they would agree TCHP was the right protocol for me… but that some paper pusher at Vivio was going to disagree with an oncologist at the best cancer hospital in the United States. I told her that Vivio is taking the most terrifying time of my life and increasing that anxiety, when they should be trying to HELP ME through this horrible time. That nothing Vivio has done at any point in time is try to help me. Everyone else wants to help, but the people who actually have the power to help are being a complete hinderance. Ugh.

On a more pleasant note, my friend Sara flies into Houston today. She was supposed to be here yesterday but they cancelled her flight because of the impending storm. Lucky they did for as bad as the storms were!