Loose Strife

You know what they say: no news is good news? With cancer, the opposite is true, too.
We were driving to the hospital for Laura’s port surgery on Friday morning when we got a call from her oncologist’s office asking for Laura to come in to talk with the doctor after the surgery. We now have enough experience to know what those calls mean. Since Laura had just been in the hospital the previous day for a full body CT scan, we knew there was news. And news is bad news.
In short, although Laura’s only been on hormone therapy for about 7 weeks, her oncologist is concerned that her cancer is not responding and so she has recommended a change in treatment to chemotherapy starting this coming week. This has struck us pretty hard. Six weeks ago we were told by an expert breast cancer oncologist at the Dana Farber that Laura’s hormone treatment would put her cancer into remission for “a very long time”. And since Laura is just now starting to feel better after a month of pain and side effects… well, this is like a slap in the face.
The details are that the number of small “bony metastases” has increased, the fluid around her lungs (pleural effusion) is larger and clearly evident on both sides, and spots were found on her ovaries (which was new because that region hadn’t been scanned before). In truth, the progression is actually pretty modest. Nevertheless, her oncologist wanted to see things either stay the same or get better — not get worse. There were good results, too. Laura’s major organs — her brain, lungs, and liver — are all cancer free.
We left the office on Friday afternoon shell shocked, but also full of questions, doubts, skepticism, and disbelief. Some of that has subsided as I’ve had a chance to do more reading about treatment options. Laura’s bitter that the doctor ruined her weekend. We still have questions and we’ll need to decide if we should get additional opinions: the main issue being whether all hormone therapy options have been adequately considered. So the next treatment decision is not certain yet, but I’ll post more about this in the next few days.
PS. The port surgery went fine. Laura now has a little bump in front of her left shoulder where a pin prick is all it takes to access a major vein. Right now she’s been resting a lot and worrying about the next step. Lily is literally a happy camper — spending an overnight with a friend in Northampton. This evening Naomi pulled on her red “Cowboy Small” boots, “strummed” my guitar, and sang Home On The Range for us about seven times.