Appointment Updates

I've had a couple of appointments the last couple of days. First I met with my new medical oncologist. Her name is Dr. Shrikhande and I really liked her. She went into a deeper dive into my pathology report with me, did a physical examination, and provided a roadmap for what's ahead. This is a nerdy medical details sort of post so if this doesn't interest you, you can easily skip it and the tldr; is that I have surgery on Feb 1, radiation 5 days a week (M-F) starting 2-4 weeks after that and lasting about a month. And then I have to take an estrogen blocker after that. If you'd like a deeper dive, read on. 

This is my pathology report from my biopsy. First up is the histologic grade. How aggressive is this cancer on a scale of 1-3? It's a 1 so that's good. Less aggressive. In the additional findings there was some more ADH in there so this likely developed from some ADH cells which means it's good that we got rid of that ADH on the left side in 2019. Then we have ER and PgR status. This is estrogen and progesterone receptor status and both are positive (more on that later) and my HER2 status is negative, which is good. 

My cancer is estrogen (ER) and progesterone (PR) receptor positive. She indicated that this is sort of a mixed thing. The good thing is that this generally means it's less aggressive and receptive to treatment, the bad thing is that there are hormones at play here and we need to address that moving forward. That means that I will be going on a medication called Tamoxifen. There are some side effects and some risks associated, but she feels that the benefits in preventing a reoccurrence outweighs the risk. I'm not super excited about going on the medication, but I also don't want cancer again so there we have it. 

My physical exam was fine. I'm in great health otherwise and wouldn't have even know this had happened if not for that MRI. I'll see her again two weeks after my surgery for a check-in. 

Then I had a consult with the radiation oncologist. He said that we will start 2-4 weeks after my surgery and I will go in 5 days a week, Monday through Friday for about 3-4 weeks for my radiation treatment. It will be a 15 minute appointment with about 3-5 minutes of that time actually getting the radiation. It will be like I have a sunburn, he said. They will give me special creams to help alleviate any discomfort. So that sounds not terrible, but it also sounds like an annoying disruption to my life to have to go get radiation every day of the week for a month.

So now I wait until February 1, which is my surgery date. I've started lining up subs for my classes for a couple weeks after that and then I will reassess what I can do at that point.