Hello....always a bystander, now I have signed up! I've gotten some great advice from the previous posts. Bless you all for your strength and perseverance throughout difficult situations!
I'll shorten my story as best I can...My mother was diagnosed with BC last year in April. She quit smoking the day she found out what it was that had been giving her bladder infections.
Yeah Mom!! She went through a barrage of tests, including a TURBT, and was then sent on to a surgeon.
In June of 2006, actually, 6/6/06 to be exact, mom underwent a Radical Cystectomy with a Neo-bladder created for her. Amazing to me, simply amazing. She had a wonderful surgeon at UW-Madison Hospital by the name of Jason Gee. Mom has had minimal problems with her neo-bladder, most due to just getting used to controlling her new "muscle". It has been a year, nearly to the day, and the neo-bladder is working wonderfully.
Fast forward to January, 2007. We returned again to Madison for a routine CT scan. The scan indicated a new mass growing in mom's left pelvis. I was dumbfounded...I didn't know much about BC at this point, just that when they took her bladder out, they said they got everything, and all surrounding tissue tested negative for any more cancer cells. Where did this mass come from?! Mom had a biopsy revealing a cancerous tumor. :'( She had now been referred to an Oncologist. (At no time in the past year did her urologist even mention seeing an Oncologist, which now I find odd, since she has cancer!) Ah, everything is 20/20 vision looking back unfortunately.
We met with an Oncologist at UW-Madison who recommended Chemo as mom's treatment. We were accepting of that, until he more or less pushed his "trial" drugs on her. Unfortunately he went about it all in the wrong way, and completely turned mom off to any "trial" anything. We returned to our hometown and got a second opinion. That doctor also recommended Chemo as the treatment of choice, which we totally expected. With Stage IV BC, however, he said, he told my mom that he will just fill out paperwork for her right away and she could go on total disability, because she should live out the remaining days having fun with family, etc. That news sends the family into total panic.....mom is 49, has 5 children with the 2 youngest nearly 16 and nearly 14. Just wasn't acceptable to mom...which lead me to find a 3rd opinion. I contacted the Cancer Treatment Center of America, the one just north of Chicago. In meeting with the staff and doctors there, mom became much more comfortable with her diagnosis, and confident that she had longer than 6 months to live, as she had been told by her previous hometown doc's opinion.
We began chemo, she goes 3 days every three weeks. After 3 rounds a CT scan revealed that the mass had only grown less than 1 cm, as opposed to 3 cm in one month back in January-February. We were due for chemo round 6 last week, when we were told that mom was too anemic for chemo. Ok, threw her into a complete downward spiral....she stared at the tv in the hotel room for 3 hours straight...and the tv wasn't on...until I informed her that anemia is very common in chemo patients! I do as much research as things happen, but am getting SO much more educated quickly, and am getting better at knowing what questions to ask, etc...
How do we deal with Anemia? Has anyone been too low to receive chemo treatment? What happens then? They did mention a blood transfusion, but before they do that, they did all her tests over again, including a CT, Bone Scan, Echo....we return to CTCA on Thursday to get the results of those tests, and to see if she is able to get chemo this week....
Does anyone know, also, what they do for a blood transfusion? Does that take more time or is it done while chemo is also administered?
And has anyone's doctor indicated a "tumor marker" number to them?
Well, that's all for now...thank you all for listening/reading...I'm so glad I found this site!!!