Sunday 8 April 2012

Latest onco app

We have recently been to see the oncologist again.  Finally I have one who gets me.  He was waitinf for me when we got there, not once did he look at his watch or hurry us on.  He has come to grips with the distraction of the entourage and with the fact that I expect answers to every question.  He did not know that I was BRCA2 positive, and was not happy about it.  He was very insistent that my sisters/mother/brother etc do the genetic screening and mostly for the ovarian cancer risk.  I get the impression that it is an ugly disease.

We did discuss 'recovering my menses'.  Which made me laugh out loud!  Who ever uses the word menses, and it sounds like I lost it under my bed somewhere!  He is American though :-)

He has said no to worry about my periods not returning yet - he wouldn't really expect them to.  But if they haven't returned by September they are probably not going to.  In light of the BRCA2 I think he would have preferred to whip out my ovaries then and there.  Which is unsettling.  He did not know how pregnancy may or may not affect any cancer growth - it's hardly a well researched topic!  But I got the impression we should get on with it if we were going to. 

So that part of our app was pretty ok really.  Until he started talking about chemo.  Apparently if they had known I was BRCA2 positive they would not have given me the FEC - they would have replaced it with a carboplatin.  I was (am?) furious and unbelievably upset.  Doing chemo in the first place was an agonising decision, to be told I had the wrong drugs made me feel like stabbing someone.  Really.

It's not like he said we wouldn't have recommended chemo.  He was just saying a change in the drugs - but that Epirubicin nearly broke me. It really did. 

To realise I didn't have to watch that red poison draining into me, that those tears and gutwrenching horror and fear didn't need to be so strong, so all-consuming - there are no words.

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