Half way there!

Today was my fourth of eight chemo treatments. I'm halfway done. With chemo, anyway. The first four treatments were infusions of two different drugs. For the last four treatments I'll do a new drug, so it will be a whole different adventure. Some people say this drug is much easier than the previous, but everyone is different. Different drug, different side effects for different people. So we'll see how it goes.

I don't even have any fun stories to tell you about. My nurse accessed my port beautifully, no stake the in heart sensations. There was no blood letting, resulting in my blood pooled on the floor. No crazy medical tests or procedures. Just another chemo infusion. One thing worthy of note is that my oncologist, after doing her examination said that if she hadn't known exactly where to look for it, she probably wouldn't have been able to find the tumor. It had reduced that much in size after only three infusions. Everyone seemed really excited about that. I wasn't entirely sure why since it really doesn't change anything. We still do surgery. We still do radiation. So I asked her. This is what she said:

It is a good thing that the tumor has gotten much smaller after three treatments because that means that when we go in to do surgery, the surgeon will have a much wider margin between the tumor and the chest wall. When the tumor is larger and the margin is smaller, it is much harder to be certain that they have removed all the cancer cells surrounding the tumor. It is also good because if the chemo treatment has been that effective in killing the Cancer cells in the breast, it has been just as effective in killing any other Cancer cells that may be hiding in other parts of my body that we don't know about.

Okay. So now I understand. Yay! It's smaller!