The Point Of It All Is .............

The other day when I was feeling fatigued and miserable, I wondered what the point of it all was.  It's quite difficult when you're fit and healthy to undertake a course of treatment like chemotherapy which is specifically designed to put the body under stress and highly likely to make you feel unwell.

But the whole point of it all is ................ to extend my LIFE expectancy and I must never forget that !!!!!!!!!!

Onco describes my treatment plan as the Gold Standard 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

• surgery to wholly excise the tumour 🌟
• chemotherapy with both 2nd and 3rd generation drugs to kill off any remaining cancerous cells which are still lurking around and undetectable 🌟
• trastuzumab targeted treatment (Herceptin) to specifically kill the HER2 positive gene cancerous cells 🌟
• bisphosphonates to prevent osteoporosis and to lessen the chance of cancer spreading to my bones 🌟
• hormone therapy (probably Letrozole) for 5 years to block oestrogen which can "feed" any remaining/recurring cancer cells 🌟

That’s a lot of drugs over a long period of time and there are two ways to think about it

• I'm unlucky because I’m at a higher risk of recurrence 

or

• I'm lucky because being higher risk means everything possible is being done to prevent recurrence

Of course whilst the drug regime is tailored to me to certain degree, at the end of the day it’s all based on statistics.  There is a NHS algorithm called Predict which will crunch the numbers and tell you, statistically, what benefit the chemo could be for you:-

So putting up with this for the next few months (or years for some drugs) increases my chances of not dying from cancer in the next 15 years from 55% to 76% - I think that's worth it.  Of course the whole thing is based on statistics so we will actually never know if my cancer doesn’t return whether or not the chemo et al had anything to do with it 😕

But I am so grateful to our wonderful NHS for finding the tumour, removing it and now doing their damnedest to make sure it never comes back 🙏🙏🙏