Visiting the oncologist

OK, silly images? There was this book series I read when I was ten years old called The Chronicles of Pydrain. It's a fantasy with high kings, wise enchanters, noble warriors and young foolish (but also noble-hearted) aventurers.

So, like, Dr. Harrington is the hero Prince Gwydion, cutting through evil foes, planning attacks, coordinating battalions -- and uh, Dr. Wahl is the wise warrior and gardener Cole, also a noble and experienced warrior, but skilled in cooking up magic potions, nurturing personal growth and dispensing wisdom. Or maybe she's the enchanter. She's rather young and vibrant to be an old enchanter though. Anway, I'm Taran the assistant pig keeper, the hapless, over-enthusiastic, naive newbie.

OK. If you didn't read it when you were ten, don't bother now. It's not really that important. It's just the whole fantasy aspect of this -- the cancer quest! And the experience of being the novice central figure in this quest guided by experienced, noble, battle-wise souls.

(And yes, it sucks that all of these fantasy characters are MEN when all of the real characters here so far are WOMEN.)

So the news. The big stuff. I discovered that the tumor they found in my breast is even smaller than I thought!! It's barely 1 cm. So, so small!! So if Dr. Harrington and her pathology troops don't find any more lymph nodes or tumors, we are, indeed, at a stage 2a breast cancer.

If they find more than 4 cancerous lymph nodes or a tumor larger than 5cm in my breast, they'll have to add radiation to my list of to-do's for this cancer.

Dr. Harrington lays it all out in a line and walks you straight through it. 1, 2, 3, bam, bam, bam. Dr. Wahl has this funny multi-vocalic ability that allows her to communicate at many levels simultaneously. There's just no way to capture everything she said here -- but here's are some things that might interest you:

The treatment is 1. Surgery 2. Chemo 3. Radiation (if needed) and 4. Drugs.

Chemo is 'TAC' -- Taxolene, Adriamyun and Cytoxan --

These guys are administered in one dose, over 3 1/2 hours, once every three weeks. I'll take a total of six doses.

One week feeling crummy. One week recovering. One week feeling good.

Here's the fun part -- I get to decide, within a certain window, when to start all of this! It's kind of fun, like a simple calendar soduku or something. Hmmmm... I'm mapping different start dates out on my calendar. So, if I don't want to be sick on neither Christmas nor Thanksgiving, I'll have to be sick on Halloween. Hmmm... If I want to have a hope of hair for my daughter's birthday in March, I'll have to be sick on Thanksgiving. So....

I got it! These are the weekends I chose to be ill!! I'll do treatments October 10th, October 31st, November 21st, December 12th, January 2nd and January 23rd.

So by April I'll have hair.
By Halloween I'll be bald.

I wasn't too keen on the wig idea, but Dr. Wahl warned me that being bald with chemo is like being noticably pregnant. Complete strangers will come up to you to talk about it.

I had this dream last night about going to a wigmaker. It was hysterical. It was in an Cairo bazaar. I'll tell you about it later.

Right now my kids are hungry and I've got to get ready for our annual camping trip to Vancouver Island.

I'll be taking the Victoria Clipper back on Tuesday for a breast MRI and genetic testing on Wednesday. I'll try to write a quick update then.