Deciding on Chemotherapy

I will start this post with a truism, "Chemo stinks but the alternative is unacceptable". What I mean by this seems obvious, but I mean this in more than one way. If the Cancer is invasive and your Lymph nodes are involved it is easy to understand the truism. If you where diagnosed with DCIS (Ductal Carcinoma In-Situ), a very early stage Breast Cancer, and you had no Lymph nodes and you only needed a Lumpectomy having Chemo might well be unnecessary.

There is a huge gray area between those two alternatives (not to mention even more advanced Cancers). In those gray areas the alternatives are not Chemo or death, but Chemo or persistent worry about the spread of Cancer. That is like living your life looking over your shoulder and worrying about every little cold or pain wondering if you are sick because the Cancer has gone someplace else. For me living that way would be unacceptable.

I have a 9 year old daughter who is the only perfectly right thing I have ever done. I love her more than I love life itself. At the time of diagnosis she was only 6. She was just forming what will eventually be her earliest memories. The thought of dying and having her only memories of me as those of me being so sick was unacceptable. She was my beacon at the darkest times of treatment.

I, like everyone have people who Love and care about me. My husband's picture should be in the dictionary next to the definition of how the husband of a breast cancer patient should be. My father has had experience with people he cares about getting Cancer; they have all died. My relatives by choice, those people who I consider family but aren't related by blood, love me unconditionally. My daughter needs a mother to help her grow up and to grow up with. Leaving any of these people with the grief of losing me and more importantly the horror of watching me die was also unacceptable.

My living or dying was not the issue. The issue was the impact of a slow painful death on those people who care about me. I have lived through both kinds of loss the sudden and the extended. I can tell you that the memories of my brother who died suddenly are of the young vibrant person he was. Those of my mother who died after a surprisingly short but horrible painful battle with lung cancer are mostly of those last painful days. There is much I would give to have my memories of my mother be also those of a vibrant alive person.

There where many ways in which I was lucky. I found an Oncologist who was willing to have my treatment be a partnership. Instead of saying this is the treatment you have to have, he gave me a list of choices explained what each entailed and told me how much each choice lowered my recurrence chance. I remember leaving the office that day and my husband being very quite. I asked what was wrong and he said something like "I was surprised by the recurrence percentages. I thought it would be zero."

This brings us to another truism, "Your recurrence chance is never zero". This shouldn't come as a surprise. Since one in eight women will be diagnosed with Breast Cancer in their lifetime, your chance of getting Breast Cancer is about 12%. If you can get your recurrence chance to 12% or less you are doing as well or better than most of the population. Without Chemotherapy my recurrence chance was over 30%. The regimen I selected lowered my recurrence chance to about 8%.

So for me Chemotherapy wasn't really a choice, it was a necessity. Taking my thought process to the bare bones. I was not going to let my daughter watch me die. I was going to be there for her High School graduation. I was going to see her get married and I was going to live a long healthy life. I have a pretty harsh view of Chemotherapy even though I feel it saved my life. Chemotherapy is killing you without letting you die. The drugs they use to treat Breast Cancer had not changed is over a decade when I underwent treatment. What had changed were the other drugs they give you that keep you alive.

You may or may not agree with my thoughts and ideas about what drove me to make my decision but I hope you can understand the thought process I went through getting there.