January 22, 2006

Last week was a great roller coaster ride – I think I would have enjoyed it more if I had been at Cedar Point though! Friday night I found out that I should only have to undergo radiation treatment as I had expected all along. Gracious – that's a 180 degree change from what I thought was going to happen after my last appointment…

Last Tuesday, Todd and I met with the medical oncologist. That is the doctor who recommends chemo, hormone and antibody therapy. She confirmed that my tumor was very small. It was not hormone responsive, so hormone therapy would not be useful. However, it was highly HER-2/neu positive, so she was recommending 1 year of antibody treatments every 3 weeks with Herceptin. (HER-2/neu is a protein that helps control cell growth; cancers that have excessive HER-2/neu grow quickly. In addition, since it was an aggressive tumor, she was recommending 4 chemo treatments spaced three weeks apart. These treatments would require that I have a subcutaneous port implanted to make all of the treatments and blood tests easier. And, I would have to undergo periodic MUGA scans to check on the condition of my heart. I was scheduled to have my baseline MUGA scan on Monday and have the port implanted on Tuesday.

Then, Friday night at 7:30, the medical oncologist called me to say that she had mis-read the pathology report for my tumor. She said that the tumor report showed no invasive component to the tumor though she thought it did. The biopsy showed ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) as well as invasive ductal carcinoma; the tumor report only showed DCIS. Without the invasive component, she felt that chemo therapy and antibody therapy would not be necessary. Wow, what a change!

I feel relieved but skeptical. Obviously, I won't be undergoing any procedures next week. I am working on obtaining a "remote" second opinion from the Cleveland Clinic. And, I'm also planning to see a different medical oncologist within the Henry Ford system. Once I have some additional opinions and am comfortable that everything is straight, I'll set up my appointment with my radiation oncologist to start radiation treatment. By then, maybe I'll be back to waxing philosophic…