The last time I posted I had just gotten the news that my cancer was growing again. The previous "soft" hormonal treatments were no longer working; it was time to bring out the big guns. My doctor and I went over all of the options and picked the chemotherapy agent that we thought would do the job with the least side effects. I was prepared to give it the old college try, even though I had once said that I would never go through chemo again, because I do want to live. I love my life and would like to keep it a bit longer. However, the treatment had its own surprises and once again I have had to make decisions and go my own way.

 I seem to be an outlier - every cytotoxin I have ever been on has tried to kill me. This time it was the xeloda. After 10 days of being on treatment I ended up in the hospital with every single side effect listed and then some. My GI tract was burned and blistered from mouth to bottom. I had hand/foot syndrome, an infection they could never identify but that Cipro knocked out, massive explosive diarrhea and subsequent dehydration, phenomenal gut pain, and a fungal infection on my skin. I was also anemic and my ketones and liver function tests were off the charts.

I was in the hospital for 7 days before they would trust me to come home. Eating was a torture but I worked my way up from fats and meats to whole grain. Once I mastered them I got to move on to cooked veggies - yahoo!

The upshot of all of this is that I felt that I needed to review the options available to me. I decided that I will not do traditional chemo anymore. I will continue on with Herceptin, but the traditional cytotoxins I will steer clear of.

This has been a decision that has been hard on my friends and family. We are so bought into the scientific studies of treatment outcomes that we forget that the science really only works on a bell curve. If you have someone like me who does not fit within the bell, you really don't know what treatment is going to do. 

I am convinced now that if I do traditional treatment, it will not just make me miserable, it will kill me. So I have decided to take my chances on feeling better for whatever time I have left. It may be short or long, but at least I won't be in the hospital wishing I was dead already. My husband supports me in this although it has raised a lot of emotions for him that I think he would prefer not to deal with.

We won't know what this decision means in terms of my longevity until I have my next scans so we are living in limbo to some extent, but we are LIVING each moment and that is the point.