March 9, 2005

1. I got the drains out today which makes it a pretty great day.  I can't drive, go in the hot tub, or do a bunch of other stuff until sometime next week, but I can live with that if I don't have to walk around looking like a Borg drone connected to the Collective (if you don't know what I mean, then you don't watch enough Star Trek -- or I watch too much).

2. We got the pathology report today from my surgery.  Man, I am so lucky I had that chemo prior to surgery...that tumor was a lot bigger than we thought, but it still wasn't into the chest wall, which is good news.  The mass they removed had clean margins, which is also good news (that means that there were no cancer cells at the edges of what they removed--if there had been, it would have meant more surgery).  And of the node masses they removed, 5 out of 8 were positive.

3. Before y'all freak out about positive nodes, I will tell you that (a) many of the cancer cells in the nodes were already dead due to the neo-adjuvant (pre-surgery) chemo; and (b) the Herceptin I got prior to surgery was busy killing all those cells in the main tumor.  Now that the tumor is gone, my three more months of chemo will be free to work on any other stray cancer cells that may be floating around out there; (c) my initial PET scan showed no tumor activity anywhere else in my body; and (d) as soon as my radiation is over, I will apply to get into the Herceptin vaccine clinical trial in Pennsylvania.  So I will be covered--I am not worried, so no one else should be.

4. And forget what I said about the shoe thing (see last entry).  As soon as I wrote that, I remembered how great it is to own more shoes.  So I bought some online yesterday and I convinced Andrea B. to go shoe shopping with me this week.

That's it for today -- now I just need to rest a LITTLE bit more, take it easy on the shopping, and get ready for more chemo next week!