We got a bit of a shit Christmas present this year. Lady Ravers has breast cancer.
She has a very strong family history of it. It killed her mum and her grandmother and two of her aunts have had it. For women in her family it’s basically a case of when, not if. It’s especially shit because we have a daughter who will no doubt have to go through this shit one day too.
Anyway, about 4 years back the missus had a risk reducing double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery. Basically they chopped her tits off and replaced them with a fabulous pair or absolute crowd pleasers with built in air horns, LEDs and everything.
At the time they actually found the early stages of cancer in there which obviously made us realise we’d done the right thing.
This was supposed to decrease her risk of breast cancer to less than 1%. Anyway she’s been massively unlucky and she has now fallen into that 1% with stage 2 breast cancer that has spread to some lymph nodes.
I’m still trying to get my head around it to be honest. How do you get tit cancer if you haven’t got any tits?
It all sounds pretty grim but we’ve caught it early and this type of breast cancer is very treatable with chemo, a bit of surgery and a drug called Herceptin 2. She’s also relatively young and very fit physically, smashing in a half marathon most weekends just for shits and giggles. This Herceptin positive type of breast cancer used to be a death sentence but thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, it is now the most treatable, with the highest survival rate.
There is nothing to worry about here and she will beat this, we just have a year of absolute shit to contend with now.
She had her first dose last week and it’s pretty ******* honking truth be told. She’s got no energy at all and spends most of the day in bed. She’s broken out in a nasty blotchy rash which looks a bit like a cross between sunburn and teenage acne. We also had a little adventure to A&E today because she keeps having heavy nose bleeds that won’t stop. It’s pretty normal by all accounts because her blood platelets are damaged by the chemo. They’ve quarterised her nose now so hopefully that won’t happen again.
Obviously she’s heavily immuno-compromised too so we’re only going out when absolutely necessary, which seems to be quite a lot actually. We’re at the hospital pretty much twice a week for scans or more chemo or what not. A bit of a pain as we live well over an hour from our nearest one and a lot of the appointments are at a specialist place in Manchester, well over 2 hours away. It’s further complicated by Covid and she has to have a PCR test at the hospital, the day before every chemo session.
So chemo, who’s had it? Give us your stories. Any practical advice on things we can do to lessen the effects? To be fair the hospital have been utterly fantastic with their help and advice so far, but it’s always good to hear the opinions of the assembled masses.
She has a very strong family history of it. It killed her mum and her grandmother and two of her aunts have had it. For women in her family it’s basically a case of when, not if. It’s especially shit because we have a daughter who will no doubt have to go through this shit one day too.
Anyway, about 4 years back the missus had a risk reducing double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery. Basically they chopped her tits off and replaced them with a fabulous pair or absolute crowd pleasers with built in air horns, LEDs and everything.
At the time they actually found the early stages of cancer in there which obviously made us realise we’d done the right thing.
This was supposed to decrease her risk of breast cancer to less than 1%. Anyway she’s been massively unlucky and she has now fallen into that 1% with stage 2 breast cancer that has spread to some lymph nodes.
I’m still trying to get my head around it to be honest. How do you get tit cancer if you haven’t got any tits?
It all sounds pretty grim but we’ve caught it early and this type of breast cancer is very treatable with chemo, a bit of surgery and a drug called Herceptin 2. She’s also relatively young and very fit physically, smashing in a half marathon most weekends just for shits and giggles. This Herceptin positive type of breast cancer used to be a death sentence but thanks to the wonders of modern medicine, it is now the most treatable, with the highest survival rate.
There is nothing to worry about here and she will beat this, we just have a year of absolute shit to contend with now.
She had her first dose last week and it’s pretty ******* honking truth be told. She’s got no energy at all and spends most of the day in bed. She’s broken out in a nasty blotchy rash which looks a bit like a cross between sunburn and teenage acne. We also had a little adventure to A&E today because she keeps having heavy nose bleeds that won’t stop. It’s pretty normal by all accounts because her blood platelets are damaged by the chemo. They’ve quarterised her nose now so hopefully that won’t happen again.
Obviously she’s heavily immuno-compromised too so we’re only going out when absolutely necessary, which seems to be quite a lot actually. We’re at the hospital pretty much twice a week for scans or more chemo or what not. A bit of a pain as we live well over an hour from our nearest one and a lot of the appointments are at a specialist place in Manchester, well over 2 hours away. It’s further complicated by Covid and she has to have a PCR test at the hospital, the day before every chemo session.
So chemo, who’s had it? Give us your stories. Any practical advice on things we can do to lessen the effects? To be fair the hospital have been utterly fantastic with their help and advice so far, but it’s always good to hear the opinions of the assembled masses.
. Try to keep everything else as normal as possible.
