no joy in mudville

No good news last night unfortunately. However, we are done testing and will now start the war.

It's breast cancer on the sternum - a 1-cm-square bit of it. It's pretty rare to see it spread to only one place - rare in a good way. So although she's in Stage 4 land, she's just barely over the border. In most patients where it has spread to more than one place in the bones, the aim is quality of life - long life in some cases, but still the aim is not a cure. In Becca's case, however, the aim is still to cure. The stuff on the bone has all the same receptors as the breast cancer - progesterone, estrogen, and her-2/neu so the chemo should go at that as well.

So after a routine brain scan on the 26th and a heart baseline test, we're off to the races. December 31st is Becca's first A-C combo round. We're doing 2-week treatments for 8 weeks, and it comes with a shot the day after each treatment to juice the bone marrow recovery (otherwise we'd be on a three week schedule). Then we head into 12 weeks on Taxol/Herceptin before the surgery in May. Apparently the T/H continues after that for a few months, and I guess radiation is in there too after the surgery at some point. And we will be getting quite comfy with the bone scan technicians. Although from now on the scans will probably be chest-only.

We are throwing everything we've got at this and our oncologist is very upbeat about the whole thing. We were both surprised at how much better we felt afterward even though it was bad news. Now at least we know what it is and there is no more testing and speculation. We now fight and win!

P.S. We went to the wig store in the hospital last night too. I tried to convince her to go blond, but alas she wants to look like she does now. ;-)