My Mother's Journey Through Breast Cancer: Updates

According to the doctors, my mom is going to be fine. She started her chemotherapy with Cytoxin and Adriamycin as well as between 15 - 18 prescription and OTC drugs. The Adriamycin caused her indigestion to increase to the point her oncologist thought she was having a heart attack. We spent a couple hours in the E.R. and they told us it was, indeed, indigestion. I don't blame the doctor for thinking she might be having a heart attack because her family is generously laced with heart disease and Adriamycin has the reputation of taking advantage of any underlying heart problems that already exist as well as causing heart problems of its own, if given the chance. After the whole indigestion issue, the doctors thought taking a stress test would be a good idea, just in case there are some problems they didn't pick up before or if the Adriamycin had already caused her heart to change for the worst. She passed the stress test with flying colors. After walking quickly for 45 minutes, she said she hadn't felt that good in a long time.

Then we started the battle with insurance. Insurance has insisted they know more than the doctors do. They say she needs special authorization for any meds that have no generic form. For example, Kapidex. Kapidex is a brand-new indigestion medication. It's so new, many pharmacies don't have it. When insurance questioned it being prescribed to her because it had no generic form, all of a sudden there was a GIANT mix-up. The pharmacy said insurance needed to hear from my mom's oncologist to know why she needed Kapidex. Her oncologist said they had already talked to insurance - and so it went back and forth like that. I'm not a genius or anything, but the insurance company is OBVIOUSLY jerking everyone around. My father works very hard to have insurance, yet they have no respect. They are "just doing their job"...I bet sitting behind a desk, filling out paperwork is a hard chore. I bet they think driving to Chicago, St. Louis, Nashville, Horsecave or anywhere else in the mid-west, hauling two trailers with all these other stupid drivers out on the road, getting stuck at a hotel away from their families because they ran out of overtime or working overnight Christmas Eve would be soooo much more fun and less of a chore than filling out paperwork in a cubical Monday through Friday, 8am - 5pm. No respect.

My mom then reaches the half-way point. She starts another chemotherapy treatment called Taxal. It is so potent they have to give her Tagamet and Benedryl before she can actually start each treatment, as well as taking a steroid so many hours before having the Taxal. Her treatments at this point are every other week, same as before. Her first treatment didn't go so well. Taxal can cause Restless Leg Syndrome and Benedryl can intensify it. Well, my mom already has that, so it intensified 10-fold. Think I'm joking? Trust me, I just about got kicked in the head at one point...LMAO. Oh MAN was my mom in a bad mood that day. I don't blame her though. If she sat down, the RLS got worse. If she stood up, she'd fall asleep and just about fall over. Hermione suggested she take a Xanax - "NO PROBLEM!," my mom exclaimed...

Then she started coughing. She kept saying she had "a tickle" in her throat. As she kept dozing off, the cough got stronger and the bouts got closer together. I asked Hermione about it. She said something wasn't right. As Hum and another nurse checked her out, they noticed a nasty welt on the side of her neck that was spreading to her chest. They immediately stopped the Taxal and gave her another steroid and informed us she was having a minor reaction to the chemo. At least it was a minor reaction. During the previous treatment, my parents had witnessed what a major reaction to the Taxal could be. Apparently, a minor reaction is not enough to switch her chemo treatment. She only had three more left.

When she went in for her third Taxal treatment, she had already met with a radiologist and he had informed us that she WOULD have to have radiation even though we were told she wouldn't have to have it. In the beginning, we were told she wouldn't have to have it because only the cancer in her right breast was invasive, the cancer in her left was not. This "wise-guy" said she would have to have it because what little cancer she had was satellited and it would lower the risk of the cancer coming back in her chest wall. "Once it hits one lymph node, we have to assume it is somewhere else as well," he had said. Sorry, I am bitter about this guy. He had a bad tone and didn't understand why we were confused. He was very arrogant in the way that he thought his shit didn't stink. You could tell he felt like what he says, goes, period.

Anyway, back to the third Taxal treatment. So she was already upset about the doctors misleading us when Doctor Mayer asked her about a tingling sensation in her fingers and toes. "They aren't tingling. They're flat out numb." Doctor Mayer didn't like that response so she gave us a choice. Her treatment needed to be switched. The only thing they could switch it to is called Taxotere. It was a cousin of Taxal, it was more potent than Taxal and it would change when she was finished with her chemotherapy. She could start the Taxotere right then and then wait three weeks for her next treatment to get her counts up or she could go ahead and do the Taxal right then, wait three weeks to do the Taxotere, then wait three more weeks before she could have her surgery. Choice 2 was not an option for any of us. That meant postponing her surgery when she had kept her treatments on the weeks of Thanksgiving and Christmas so it wouldn't do that in the first place. My mom, of course, agreed with Doctor Mayer and I that if she truly wanted it all over as soon as possible, she should opt to start the Taxotere right away.

Now all of this was going on at the hospital, Doctor Mayer's office, Doctor King's office or Doctor Lee's office. What I haven't mentioned is the pain she had to deal with at home. She had physical pain AND emotional pain. The physical pain was obviously related to her chemo. She still had the "crashing" which is totally normal - the extreme fatigue, the arthritic pain (which wasn't as bad as we had heard it would be), the RLS, the strange food cravings, hot flashes (actually menopause, in general), the extreme pain of her bone marrow rejuvenating, and extreme skin sensitivity to touch more than sunlight or cold or wind. My mom would take those physical pains over her emotional pains any day.

The emotional pain of dealing with the idiots in administration and clerical at the hospital was the biggest problem out of all. We've had a woman treat my mom terribly and do all but spit on her. We've had a woman lie and try to cover it up, a woman tell us they accept one insurance and not the other, people try to tell us what our insurance covers and doesn't cover (yet our agent tells us something completely different), and because of these idiots that think they know more than they actually do, the hospital NOW REFUSES to submit certain bills to insurance because THEY say they HAVE submitted it when INSURANCE says they HAVE NOT. Pardon my outbursts, but it is times like these that make me wonder: How could it get much worse? How is it God has not started the Revelations Chapter in this life? Don't get me wrong, I trust God. He/She is all-knowing, almighty, merciful and wonderful. But it's times like these I wish I actually lived in the movie Boondock Saints.

Holy CRAP would I be ONE HELL of an ACTION HERO!!!

To family, friends and everyone else that has been there for us: THANK YOU! We are humbled at the number of you that were actually there for us. We never could have imagined such a wonderful group of people. WE LOVE YOU ALL!!!

Next Chemotherapy: January 26th, 2010, 12pm
Bi-Lateral Mastectomy Surgery: February 16th, 2010
Spacers for Reconstruction Surgery: February 16th, 2010
Radiation: TBA - no sooner than 2 weeks after Spacer Reconstruction Surgery, M-F for 5-6 weeks