New Chemo (Taxol) and Guest Speaker Update

2/26/07

New Chemo and Guest Speaker Update

Hi Everyone,

Just a couple of updates on what’s going on lately. First, I have started my second chemo drug, Taxol, and I have had a pretty good reaction to the drug so far. This Thursday I will go for the second cycle of Taxol. It takes about 3 ½ hours to administer and that combined with blood tests and the anti nausea drip, we are there about six hours total. After Thursday I will only have two more chemo sessions left. Yeah!

I was told by a cancer survivor that Taxol is a dream come true in the chemo world and she was not kidding. Even though it takes forever to administer, I do not get the nose burning, chemical taste that I did with Cytoxan. I will not miss that one bit. I also did not get as nauseous as I did with the first chemo drugs. Normally I would take anti nausea meds for 7-9 days with the last drugs and this time I took them for only 2 days. So that made me happy.

What didn’t make me happy about Taxol is one of the major side effects, bone pain. I could definitely do without the bone pain. As one who has bone pain most of the time I thought I was pretty well prepared for it. Not so much. This bone pain was really in there. It started Saturday night and didn’t end until Wednesday. It was in my joints, ankles, knees, hips and low back, so much so that I was couch ridden for two days. As one who hates to take pain meds, I took them any way. It didn’t help much with the pain but it certainly made day time TV more interesting. In the grand scheme of things, I will take the bone pain over nausea any day of the week. I also had way more energy and felt like my regular self in a day or two.

On another note, as most of you know, Nicky, our oldest, is a 4th grade school teacher. She teaches many subjects, one of which is health. She has a health book that the kid’s use that literally says the sentence “if you get cancer you will die”, the book is 12 years old and clearly outdated. So she told the kids that the information wasn’t necessarily true and talked about me again. If you remember from an earlier e-mail, the kids sent me jokes as a get well present when I went in for my surgery, so they know that I have cancer.

On Friday I went to talk to both of her health classes about cancer and let them know that you don’t always die from cancer if you catch it early. It was really fun and the kids were great. I told them about my type of cancer and some of the things that I was going through with my battle. At the end and pretty much during the whole “presentation” the kids asked a ton of questions. Depending on the questions asked made each session go a little different.

Some of the questions the kids asked were:

• Did it hurt?
• How did you find it?
• How much does your chemo cost?
• How many shots do you have to get?
• Are you going to die?
• What color was your hair? What did it look like?
• Do you have to miss work?
• Were you scared when you found out?
• Can you get Neulasta even if you don’t have cancer?
• How did you get cancer?

There were bunches more but you can see they asked great questions. They really put a lot of thought into them. I showed them my bald head and my scar on the back of my head from the 5th grade swing set incident. I think they liked that part the best. A few of the kids knew people who had cancer, some who lived and some who died. It’s unfortunate that cancer affects so many people regardless of who gets it.

Afterwards I passed out hot pink breast cancer bracelets to each of the kids. I had a great time with them and I hope they did too. Nicky, or should I say Miss Anderson, is a wonderful teacher and we are very proud of the work she does.

Well thanks for listening, again. I hope you are all doing well and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your love and support. Have a great day!

Love to you all,

Jen