Bad News and Bubbly

Good news first: some of the nodes in my neck have actually stabilized. The bad news is that the CT scans show several enlarged lymph nodes in my chest, between my lungs, and a couple of small lesions on my lungs. Also one or two tiny places on my liver that we “need to watch.” Hearing the news in my oncologist's office, my husband and I were devastated (read: crying our faces off) and left the meeting shaky and disoriented (read: stunned and wanting to scream at the universe.) We dried our tears, donned our sunglasses, went to a patio and ordered champagne. Eff you cancer, said we.  This is the best we could manage this afternoon, and I think we did it well. What this all means is that I’m off the clinical trial, ending my love affair with HDAC-inhibitors before it could really begin. But I still have a lot of options.  I am to begin a new chemotherapy immediately. I will continue with Herceptin. I can even still do the 60K “Weekend to End Breast Cancer” walk on September 12/13 if I feel up to it.  And I intend to feel up to it. For now though, I don’t feel up to anything, except taking a nap to rest my cried-out eyes, and then maybe jumping on a plane and running away to somewhere hot and sunny and beachy...  But how can you run away from something that’s inside you?  You can’t.  You just have to stand and fight. So I will fight. But first, that nap.