About this trail

I started 2013 with a 'second' or 'recall' or 'dense tissue' mammogram on January 2, 2013. That spiraled into a series of additional imaging and testing.

On Thursday, January 10th, 2013 my doctor called me to tell me that I have an aggressive and invasive breast cancer.  On that date it was not known if there was metastasis or spread into other areas of the body. Thankfully other testing, including a PETSCAN on January 11th, 2013 with results given to me on January 14th, 2013, showed no spread to other organs. Treatment for me then included a bilateral mastectomy on February 20th, 2013 and a series of four 21-day chemotherapy cycles that started in March. The reason for going through chemo was because there was cancer spread to my lymphatic system. Chemotherapy is recommended when the spread reaches lymph nodes -- the entry of the blood system to other parts of the body. Chemotherapy attacks the remaining cells that are fast dividing; it doesn't attack the slow growing cells. For slow growing cells, the final stage of invasive breast cancer is hormone blockers -- in my case, Tamoxifen.

I looked at my initial treatment of mastectomy and chemotherapy and recovery from this initial treatment as lasting a season -- roughly from Valentines Day through Labor Day. After this relatively shorter season, I then entered a longer season of treatment (Tamoxifen); the research varies in recommendations (2 to 5 to 10 years to indefinitely).  Cancer hit me as a healthy 44 year old female, mother, wife, daughter, family-member, educator, clinician, classmate, prior decades competitive athlete, and friend.

During this season other challenges presented to me included work as an online educator, and work as a graduate student in a new career path that included taking comprehensive and license exams -- a six year journey that started as a way to help my son. Life changed for me -- but it didn't slow down; I just had to get creative in how things got squeezed into my schedule. The state license exam happened right before the mastectomy; the comprehensive exams were completed the day before I started chemo. The hardest challenge that also emerged was that my son started having 'tonic-clonic' seizures (gran mal seizures) around the time of my diagnosis. During this time we both were in and out of hospitals; I was more worried about his occurrences than my breast cancer.

I started this blog to keep my information organized for what was a huge learning curve for me. When I got resources from others, I hunted down those resources in emails which was another challenge. So, I started placing these items here on this blog. Items I got range from nutrition information to doctors to support group info. I also included just general thoughts along the way. For instance, this was a place to talk about tough decisions I had to make in terms of treatment and recovery. Life with and life after breast cancer is a completely new territory for me and I don't know what to expect but I'm choosing to staying positive.

I'm also using this as a place -- a paper trail in a sense -- for anyone who wants to learn more about my circumstance or is going through the same thing or will go through the same thing. Each path is so different and the information I gathered and I'm gathering now will help me narrow the best options for me. Maybe one part might help someone else.


I'm using www.blogger.com for this blog; I almost always use the iPhone app for these updates which tend to happen at my doctor visits while I wait for appointments. Blogging gave me something to do and reflect upon at the same time.