A Follow-up on Sheila

After Sheila's terribly rough night (and frightening) and middle-of-the-night ambulance ride to the hospital almost two weeks ago, we had a couple of follow-up medical appointments. Those are out of the way now but a few more appointments are scheduled for the next eight weeks or so.  (Plus, a few appointments for myself in those same eight weeks for diagnostics and treatment for my own serious health issues... this is a couple of months neither one of us are looking forward to.) 

To refresh everyone's memory... Sheila is in treatment and still under constant medical care after her second fight (in ten years) with breast cancer. She has another nine years of treatment to go this time around and it has been rather rough going thus far.

Honestly, if we were to compare her treatment today to treatments two+ decades ago, what she is experiencing is... let's say mediocre... by comparison. That being said, her quality of life has been rather low regardless.

Sheila is older this time around so that certainly plays into how well her body can tolerate things. Not only did the cancer return far more quickly than we had ever anticipated in our most pessimistic scenarios but she also had the cancer spread into her lymph nodes this last time. This cancer was all caught quickly and removed within a week or two but she will need ten years of treatment this time around. 

The first phase of her treatment was surgery within days of diagnosis to remove all of the cancer. The surgery on her breast and lymph nodes was successful and, in the big scheme of things, not absolutely terrible physically speaking. Emotionally, it was a rough time but everything happened so quickly and it was the second time around so, in some weird ways, it was less difficult overall. There was definitely some recovery needed after the surgery but considering this is a life threatening disease, the surgery really was the relatively easy part. 

Then came a more aggressive radiation treatment than her first time around. This was tough... perhaps even grueling... and it continued to worsen her overall physical condition for months afterward. Truthfully, she is still trying to rebound from this aggressive course of radiation treatment many months later. The lingering effects of radiation are very obvious in her daily struggles.

Following the radiation treatment, Sheila jumped into the next phase of her treatment which is a ten year plan consisting of the possibility of four drugs and promising a lot of frustrating, annoying and even debilitating side effects. This is where we are today. 

During her emergency room visit two weeks ago, the doctors were initially concerned that perhaps her cancer had spread to her brain so some detailed imaging was done within hours. Fortunately, there are absolutely no signs of cancer in her brain and the doctor who told us this news was visibly jubilant as she relayed this news to us. Of course, we were quite relieved as well but still quite "guarded" in our handling of all this news. After getting knocked around and knocked down so many times, you become a bit guarded no matter what you are told. 

Throughout all of our medical problems over the years, we've become quite adept at reading body language, tonal qualities in voices and the words chosen to express things to us and we found it quite obvious that this doctor was truly relieved and happy to see no problems in Sheila's imaging. Her body language was screaming relief which, in turn, reminded us of how serious all of this really is even though it has become rather normal to us. 

The emergency room doctors advised her to stop taking her cancer treatment drug until she saw her Oncology team because it was entirely possible that this treatment was causing at least two significant problems. This was the second drug in her treatment plan. We visited her Oncology team last week and Sheila had some difficult and emotional decisions to make so she took a few days to sort out her feelings and emotions while she applied some common sense logic to her options. 

On the one hand, Sheila's Oncologist reminded Sheila that she could refuse treatment due to the severity of the side effects... it is not recommended, but she could always refuse treatment. Or, she could attempt this same course of treatment again and hope that some of the more serious symptoms were a coincidence and not really side effects. Some difficult and emotional topics needed to be discussed and the decisions needed to be made rather quickly. 

Refusing treatment feels too much like giving up on life and neither of us are even close to giving up on life so that option was out. However, time was needed to come to terms with jumping back into the poorer quality of life again.

I'm not going to get into great detail here but when you are in the midst of miserable side effects and symptoms so bad that you need EMTs and an emergency room, you seriously begin to question the wisdom of long term treatment. In the end, neither of us want the cancer to return again a third time anytime soon so resuming treatment was the final decision.

The good news is Sheila resumed her treatment again. The bad news is, within hours, her quality of life dropped again significantly but she plans to stick it out for as long as possible.  Hopefully, the more serious and significant problems will not return this time around....



POST EDIT (only an hour or so later after publishing this blog entry):  Sheila just informed me that one of the serious and significant side effects has returned. She'll be contacting the Oncology team. So, these latest problems were not a coincidence and we'll be having more serious discussions in the coming days...