B Cup Begone! -- Andrea's Story

The second dose of chemo is in the books and Andrea is doing great!  It was bit of a hard week as hair started falling out at an unbelievably rapid pace.  There were a few tears but Andrea is a real trooper, and with her new military-style hairdo, she is beginning to look like it.  She really is a strong woman and I have a hard time putting into words how impressive her attitude has been as she has approached this whole experience with cancer.  She's a superwoman.   I feel like we are at a point in the treatment that not a lot changes from day to day.  It's like driving toward a distant mountain, knowing with each minute that passes you are getting closer, but every time you look up all you see is a mountain in the distance.  After talking with Andrea, we decided it would be okay to move to a new phase of our blog and instead of a weekly update, only post when we actually have something interesting to tell--no need for a weekly hair and make-up...

Why wait for chemo to take your hair when you can do it yourself and have some fun!  This week's big news was Andrea's new hair--short and spiked into a mohawk.  She went with Josie and had some fun trying on the new do.  If you haven't had a chance to check it out on her Facebook page, you can find the picture she posted there. We spent some time this week on vacation to the Grand Canyon, which is a special place for Andrea.  She was supposed to hike from rim to rim with her friends this year while I was going to be the driver to pick them up at the South Rim when they were done.  Cancer changed those plans and Andrea wasn't able to do the hike, but her friends carried her across in spirit with t-shirts that said "Cancer Can Take a Hike. We Hike For Andrea."  It was cool to see them rally around her even though she wasn't able to go. Tomorrow is round two for chemo.  After that, she'll be halfway done with the red devil.

As the guy who doesn't have cancer, walking into chemo treatments with Andrea is a little like watching a wildfire burn with my chin on a shovel while all the firefighters around me are doing their best to contain the flames.  On Monday we spent five hours meeting with our doctor, getting Andrea set up for her for first treatment, and then finally dripping a bunch of chemicals into her port.  It was a surprise to me just how long it takes for people to receive their treatments.  As the nurse showed us around the treatment center during our chemo class a few weeks ago, it seemed like we were the new kids in a strange school and now I know why.  Spending hours every week, or for some everyday, sitting in a chair with a tube dripping into you, you start to get to know the people around you.  We met a couple of funny ladies, a really nice guy that told us the best place to get food, and an old guy that worked the room from the second he came in to the minute he left...

The 4th of July in Andrea's hometown is celebrated intensely with an explosion of amateur pyrotechnics in honor of the birth of our nation.  It is a time of homecoming and family traditions, the kind you might find on a Norman Rockwell.  It was a fantastic week to get together with loved ones and to see Andrea in the most normal setting she's been in for a while.  I'm sure in a lot of ways it was just a calm before a storm as Andrea begins chemo tomorrow.  There is a lot more information available about chemo on Google than what you'll find from me, but after all the time we've spent talking with our doctors, here's what we are expecting on Monday.  The chemo that Andrea will receive affects the fast growing cells in the body and their ability to replicate.  Because Andrea has such an aggressive cancer, the chemo can be very effective in targeting those fast growing cells.  Her first course of chemo will be a dose of adriamycin-cyclophosphamide every...

Andrea had her port installed on Tuesday this past week so we were at the hospital for an operation once again.  This one was much shorter, but I'm a pro now at the whole sit and wait game.  After getting Andrea all prepped up and covered in her favorite warm blankets, the doctors started to come in to do their pre-surgery checks and explanations.  Come to find out, the nurse anesthetist who was going to care for Andrea was a man I grew up with.  It was an awesome comfort to know that she was going to be in such good hands.  The surgery went well and since it was far less invasive than her past operation, we were able to head home soon after she came back to the recovery room. This week was also full of different tests and scans.  We ran into our first hiccup with the insurance company as they would not approve one of the tests the oncologist ordered.  Andrea called the doctor's office and he said that it will now go into a process where he has to ca...

As a football fan I've heard all my life that it is a game of inches.  An inch gained here, an inch lost there can be the difference between wining and losing.  Cancer must be a game of millimeters then and we're hoping this week we got information that will find us on the winning side of the line.  Since the surgery last week we have been waiting for the pathology to get back and on Wednesday we finally found out some more about the tumor that was removed and the tissue surrounding it.  The big news that we've been waiting on has been whether or not the cancer had spread to the lymph nodes.  According to the pathology report there were no cancer cells present in the lymph nodes.  We were also anxious to find out about the margins, the distance between the cancer cells and the edge of the tissue sample, and found out that the closest margin was 1 mm between the breast tissue and where it was taken off the muscle wall.  The overall tumor was 3.5 x 3.0...