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October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so it’s a good time to bring you up to date on what’s been going on with me for the past year and a half.
In May 2023 I was diagnosed with breast cancer in my right breast following a routine mammogram. (So if you want reasons that you ought to be doing routine mammograms, I am one. Also, the word that now strikes fear into my heart is “distortion.”) I did not say anything at the time because I REALLY did not want to talk about it. I just wanted to get through it.
They did biopsies, they did an MRI (which is the most unpleasant medical experience of my life to date, excepting only IUD insertion), they determined that the best thing to do was surgery followed by radiation. Happily, it---or they, there were two of them---they were not the sort of tumor that called for chemo. Also happily, they were very small, so a complete mastectomy was also not called for. At the beginning of July, I had a lumpectomy. They got both tumors, the margins were clear, the lymph node they dissected was clear. All good. I spent July and August recovering from surgery. Lots of fatigue.
In September I had radiation treatments for 20 days. Following excellent advice from my friend Elizabeth Bear, I used calendula cream and Korean snail slime religiously and never had anything worse than a mild sunburn. And more fatigue.
In October I started on Tamoxifen, which is an estrogen blocker. And here things started to go awry. The Tamoxifen made my fibromyalgia not just worse, but TERRIBLE. I was in miserable amounts of pain basically daily. So in January my oncologist decided to try halving my dose (from 20 mg to 10). The fibromyalgia cleared up, but the fatigue did not, so I wasn’t in pain, but I was exhausted. I was going to bed at 8 every night, sleeping from like 9 to 6 and then taking a 3 or 4 hour nap every afternoon. Not great, but I was still hoping my body would adjust when at the end of March I got a blood clot in my right calf.
No more Tamoxifen.
We tried a 10-day course of blood thinner injections (NOT FUN), but after that was done it became apparent that the blood clot was still a problem (my right foot started swelling and became too painful to walk on), so I started three months’ worth of blood thinner pills.
(At around this same time, I started getting nauseated. As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with the cancer or the cancer treatment, but it is persistent as hell.)
Had a mammogram in April that showed nothing wrong
Finished the blood thinners at the end of July and, the Tamoxifen having had time to clear my system, started estrogen suppression therapy, with an injection every three months and pills daily. So far, the big side effect is that my temperature regulation is completely out of whack, so that I spend my days going from too hot to too cold back to too hot, with the occasional hot flash thrown in for good measure. This is not pleasant, but it is better than the terrible fibromyalgia, and my oncologist holds out hope that it will in fact get better with time.
Had an MRI at the beginning of October which showed no problems, and---my oncologist tells me---breast MRIs are notorious for false positives, so if it didn’t find anything, that means there really isn’t anything to find.
So, from the perspective of this major and very scary upheaval, things are really going pretty well. It’s hard to say whether my current health problems (endless fatigue, nausea, anhedonia, apathy, complete lack of creativity) have anything to do with cancer or cancer treatment. (We’re currently tapering my antidepressant to see if that changes anything.) But I am doing my best to keep fighting.
In May 2023 I was diagnosed with breast cancer in my right breast following a routine mammogram. (So if you want reasons that you ought to be doing routine mammograms, I am one. Also, the word that now strikes fear into my heart is “distortion.”) I did not say anything at the time because I REALLY did not want to talk about it. I just wanted to get through it.
They did biopsies, they did an MRI (which is the most unpleasant medical experience of my life to date, excepting only IUD insertion), they determined that the best thing to do was surgery followed by radiation. Happily, it---or they, there were two of them---they were not the sort of tumor that called for chemo. Also happily, they were very small, so a complete mastectomy was also not called for. At the beginning of July, I had a lumpectomy. They got both tumors, the margins were clear, the lymph node they dissected was clear. All good. I spent July and August recovering from surgery. Lots of fatigue.
In September I had radiation treatments for 20 days. Following excellent advice from my friend Elizabeth Bear, I used calendula cream and Korean snail slime religiously and never had anything worse than a mild sunburn. And more fatigue.
In October I started on Tamoxifen, which is an estrogen blocker. And here things started to go awry. The Tamoxifen made my fibromyalgia not just worse, but TERRIBLE. I was in miserable amounts of pain basically daily. So in January my oncologist decided to try halving my dose (from 20 mg to 10). The fibromyalgia cleared up, but the fatigue did not, so I wasn’t in pain, but I was exhausted. I was going to bed at 8 every night, sleeping from like 9 to 6 and then taking a 3 or 4 hour nap every afternoon. Not great, but I was still hoping my body would adjust when at the end of March I got a blood clot in my right calf.
No more Tamoxifen.
We tried a 10-day course of blood thinner injections (NOT FUN), but after that was done it became apparent that the blood clot was still a problem (my right foot started swelling and became too painful to walk on), so I started three months’ worth of blood thinner pills.
(At around this same time, I started getting nauseated. As far as I can tell, it has nothing to do with the cancer or the cancer treatment, but it is persistent as hell.)
Had a mammogram in April that showed nothing wrong
Finished the blood thinners at the end of July and, the Tamoxifen having had time to clear my system, started estrogen suppression therapy, with an injection every three months and pills daily. So far, the big side effect is that my temperature regulation is completely out of whack, so that I spend my days going from too hot to too cold back to too hot, with the occasional hot flash thrown in for good measure. This is not pleasant, but it is better than the terrible fibromyalgia, and my oncologist holds out hope that it will in fact get better with time.
Had an MRI at the beginning of October which showed no problems, and---my oncologist tells me---breast MRIs are notorious for false positives, so if it didn’t find anything, that means there really isn’t anything to find.
So, from the perspective of this major and very scary upheaval, things are really going pretty well. It’s hard to say whether my current health problems (endless fatigue, nausea, anhedonia, apathy, complete lack of creativity) have anything to do with cancer or cancer treatment. (We’re currently tapering my antidepressant to see if that changes anything.) But I am doing my best to keep fighting.
