why chemo?

Some of you may be wondering, if the surgery got everything, and the margins and lymph nodes were clear, then why do I need chemo?

Partly, it has to do with the grade of cancer - three on a scale of one to three, three being the worst. These cancer cells are/were as far as you can get from normal. Second, the tumor was invasive - it had broken out of the ductal walls, and crossed breast tissue to invade other ducts, which means that some of these cells also made it out into my bloodstream. Not necessarily in a way that could be detected in a blood sample, but the science says they're out there, in my body, thinking about settling in somewhere else. So we've got to kill them off before that can happen.

The info gathered in what is called the cancer bank (into which all my cancer-related data has gone, and will continue to go, as they will track my progress and health for the rest of my life), tells us that, if I elected to stop treatment after surgery, I would have a 32% chance of getting cancer again. Not over-fond of those odds, myself. If I do the chemo treatments, followed by radiation, the chance decreases to about 12%, or less, which is similar to the odds for the average woman who has not had breast cancer.

That, I can live with.

For the next few months, I'll be having six treatments, which last about 3hrs each, with the treatments three weeks apart. So I'll be done mid-May with chemo, after which I'll go on to radiation, which will further reduce any chance of local recurrence. And somewhere in there, I also get to start a regime of anti-hormone therapy which will last 5 yrs, since my tumor was fed by hormones.

So that's it, in a nutshell. Having chemo, and the rest of the treatments, means I can beat this, permanently. Or at least as permanently as possible.