moving on?

 I don't really know how to think about this current stage of cancer treatment. The really intense phases of active treatment-- chemo and surgery-- are done. As far as we can tell, the cancer is gone. Yet I'm still taking meds to treat it/prevent it coming back, and will be for years. It's not quite active treatment, or not the way chemo was, but maybe...passive treatment? It's still...something. It's a weird time (then again, everything about cancer has been weird). 

During chemo I was getting infusions of two chemotherapy drugs (taxotere+carboplatin) and two her2 targeted drugs (herceptin + perjeta). We think my cancer is all gone, but there's always the risk of stray cancer cells floating around my body, waiting to come back (some people call this state "schroedinger's cancer"), which is why I'm still continuing with more meds. I started back up with herceptin (by itself this time) a few weeks ago, and will keep those up every 3 weeks through about July. I didn't notice any side effects from my first herceptin-only infusion, and hopefully that'll keep up. I'm not a huge fan of returning to the infusion center again, but it's at least a much shorter, easier process than full chemo was.

Last week I also started my endocrine therapy, taking Tamoxifen which blocks breast tissue from absorbing estrogen. The plan is to take it for 5 years and then we'll reassess. If I'm tolerating it well I may continue taking it for another 5 years, or there may be new data that informs our decisions at that point. I've been a little nervous about taking this drug... many people have no side effects, or mild/tolerable ones. But I've also seen stats indicating that as many as half of the people who start it, stop before finishing their 5-10 year courses because the side effects are too severe and uncomfortable. It's a bizarre experience to be taking it and waiting to see how it affects me.  

One of the stranger aspects of processing this whole "I had cancer" thing (still getting used to using that past tense), is figuring out how to even frame the story in my head. There's a part of me that tries to minimize it.... Like, yes, I had cancer, I went through chemo, it was kinda horrific, my breast was amputated, BUT I was only ever stage 1, my cancer was always highly curable. I wasn't really in danger of like, dying, right? My case was so much less severe than so many other people's. I have the luxury of putting cancer treatment behind me eventually, and objectively speaking I have good odds to not have to go through any of this again. It was just a thing, I got through it, and now I'm ok. No biggie. Right?

And then another part of my brain is like HOLY FUCK, I had FUCKING CANCER. And it could still COME BACK?!?!? What the fuck do I even DO with that information?? I don't know that I'll ever fully wrap my head around all this. 

Fun fact: depending on what studies you look at, what factors are accounted for, etc, my risk of recurrence over the next 5-20+ years seems to be somewhere between 5% and 25+%. Those numbers could certainly look a whole lot worse, but they're still far from comforting. Especially when my brain plays funny games like "well you already had the statistically unlikely thing happen, what's to stop that from happening again?" Also, whether rational or not, while I don't think cancer is going to kill me in the short term, I have much less of an expectation of living till old age. That doesn't necessarily feel scary to say, it just kinda feels like a pragmatic take? There's the risk of my cancer coming back, plus the increased risk of other things (other kinds of cancers, cardiac issues, etc) that are increased somewhat by the meds I'm taking to keep the breast cancer away. 

Anyway. So, yeah. It's a weird time. Sometimes I feel close to back to "normal," and other times I very much do not. I feel so much better than I did a few months ago, but I'm also still tired and in some sort of pain/discomfort a lot of the time (my joints feel like they aged 30 years all of a sudden). There are still weird chemo side effects that are lingering, months afterwards. I'm trying to be patient with myself about it all, knowing that this sort of healing takes a long time and is often non-linear.