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A year long fight against Triple Negative Breast Cancer


It has been over a year of fighting this horrible cancer. What a year it has been. 

I was diagnosed on the 27th January 2022 with Triple Negative Breast Cancer after turning 40 and having a routine mammogram. I had no signs or symptoms but was just being precautionary. So I was in a bit of shock when the news was broken to me. I was 40 and couldn’t believe I had the most aggressive type of breast cancer. 

The next six months was the hardest six months I had experienced. It started with dose dense red devil which was the harshest treatment to experience. It took my hair, energy, and zest for life. The fatigue was the hardest but I managed to push through each day. Scans at the end of the 4 dose dense treatments showed that this drug had shrunk my cancer significantly which was a motivator to keep going. 

The next stage was dose dense Taxol. I was meant to have 12 doses but because I had managed the dose dense regime with the red devil drug they decided to go dose dense with this drug also. The first dose dense (3 doses in 1) I ended up with Peripheral Neuropathy in my fingers and toes. This was a concern because this condition can become long term so it had to be monitored. I completed the next dose dense treatment and the neuropathy got worse. My fine motor control was hard with simple things like buttoning up clothes and tying shoe laces. I ended up having the next treatments reduced and all up I had the equivalent of 10 treatments out of 12. It was stopped short to try and prevent long term damage. 

After five months of intensive chemo, I had a lumpectomy to remove the cancer. So nice to finally remove the cancer from my body. My histology showed that the margins around the cancer were all clear which means they got all of the cancer. The lymph nodes were clear and some other test that looks at lymph channels that can turn into blood vessels and transfer the cancer into the blood system were all clear which is another positive outcome. 

I then healed up from surgery and started six months of oral chemotherapy. This involved three tablets on the morning and three at night for two weeks and then one week off. The tablets mop up any microscopic cancer cells left over from surgery. The chemo tablets takes my risk of reoccurrence not happening from 56.1% to 69.8%. Got to be happier with those percentages.These tablets had limited side effects. The main problem I had was my liver function wasn’t the best and towards the end fatigue set in. Early January, a week before my one year diagnosis, I finished the tablets. 

Move forward six weeks and I am four days out for my double mastectomy and reconstruction. When I was diagnosed with cancer I never expected that treatment would go for over a year. Surgery will take me four to six weeks to heal. I just hope it’s is the last step in this fight for my life. 

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