September 2, 2016

Well, the summer is ending, and I am about a week and a half out from my last chemotherapy treatment. Whew.
I almost finished with chemotherapy before I knew it - at my appointment with my oncologist before treatment, he was concerned to hear that the pain in my fingers and toes had gotten a little bit worse, even though he had decreased the amount of the drug I'd gotten by 20 percent. He gave us the option of skipping the last treatment - in the long run, missing one chemotherapy treatment isn't that significant. It was tempting, but my first thought was What if it comes back, and you didn't do everything you could to stop it? I decided to get the last treatment (and was pleased to find out that Jeff felt the same way).
So the tingling and numbness and weird pain in my fingers has gotten a little bit worse, and has pretty much taken over my feet. My feet always feel freezing cold - like I've been outside for hours, standing in the snow, to the point of pain, cold. All of my fingertips are numb. (Before, it was just my thumbs and first two fingers.) Some - and possibly all - of this, my oncologist told me, will go away. It can take up to a year, though, so this is just how it is for now. It's better than cancer.
The cold feet thing is super weird. I keep wanting to warm them up - putting them under blankets or against Jeff's legs - but they really aren't cold at all. My feet were so cold a few nights ago that I got out of bed and found socks to wear.
It doesn't quite feel real that I'm done with chemotherapy (but then again, it has never really felt real that I have cancer in the first place). Jeff has joked that next Wednesday, we should go up to Madison and just do fun things. We will be heading up there next week - I have an appointment with my surgeon on Sept. 9. I'm ready to move on to the next step, which looks like it will be surgery to remove the mass in my right breast. Jeff is convinced there shouldn't be anything there - that the chemotherapy should have killed everything off - but we'll let the surgeon decide. I had a biopsy done on the mass at FHN before I had my first surgery, and the results came back negative, but my surgeon said - and I agree - that a biopsy is just a look at one part of the mass. There could be cancer cells right next to the ones that got biopsied. Also, the type of mass it is, according to my oncologist, is more likely (than normal cells) to turn cancerous. So, let's get it out.
After that, I'll have radiation treatments here in Freeport. I'm not sure how long that will last - it seems like 5 or 6 weeks is the standard. So I may not have this all wrapped up before the end of the year, but it'll be close.
I'm hoping that my hair will grow in quickly. (Before all this, my hair seemed to grow fast.) My head still looks stubbly and weird. I'm definitely going to need some nice warm hats this winter, and I won't have to worry about "hat head"!