Maggie's

Ping no more

That’s it! No more microwaving! No more anything in fact! My treatment (apart from taking hormones for 5 years) is over!! Hooray!

After the weekend (woke at 4.20pm on Saturday and 2.10 yesterday) this week is designated as official Sleep Fest I’m afraid – I seem to have a lot of catching up to do. It’s actually a bit weird – since March I’ve been driven by various treatments either taking place or pending, and I feel a bit lost and a bit on my own. But I’m told this is normal, and I’ll get used to it – we’ll see.

So to summarise, the breast surgeon is very pleased with his handiwork, I have my bag of fluid to cherish and nurture, and get to see him again in July. In the interim – March I think – I have my annual mammogram which I’ll be pleased to get out of the way before we tiger hunt. The oncologist is happy the hormone tablets are ‘only’ attacking my knee joint and not having any other side effects, which made me decide to stay put on this pill – it can be a lot worse I gather. She also sobered me a little when I asked for my 5 year survival chances. In a population sample of people with my grade and size of tumour and the horrendously high number of affected lymph nodes, had I just had surgery I’d have a 1 in 3 chance of being around. In that same sample who’ve had 6 cycles of chemo and 5 years of hormone therapy this doubles to 2 in 3. I have to take the fact I only had 5 chemo cycles into account (negative) but also the fact I had radiotherapy (positive) which isn’t taken into account in the sampling. Slightly worse chances than I’d hoped for, but ‘interesting’ to know, it sounds macabre and I knew I’d probably be upset, but I had to know what the stats said.

So that’s me. Probably not going to be much to report for a while but I will keep in occasional touch, if only to let you know I’m still around!