3/13/08

P.S. - I love my oncologist

We met Dr. Jeffrey Margolis today, and it was totally great. As we walked out, Bill looked at me and said "He's a rock star." I'm totally relieved because we had met the other pieces of this puzzle and I know he's the one I'll be seeing the most...I wanted to be confident.

So here's what it looks like: He thinks I'll get 6 rounds of TAC...here's what I found about it:

TAC is named after the initials of the chemotherapy drugs involved, docetaxel (pronounced doe-se-tax-el), which is commonly known as Taxotere®, doxorubicin (docks-o-rou-bi-sin), which was originally called Adriamycin® and cyclophosphamide (sigh-clo-fos-fa-mide).

I'll have it every 21 days, and begin sometime after surgery - he estimates 4 weeks because I'm having the bilateral mastectomy and reconstruction. I will lose my hair, and I'll be tired, but I knew that. I'm also going to have a port installed (ha ha) so that the veins on my arms won't be ruined since I'll only have the one arm for blood draws, etc (after lymph nodes are removed on the right, I can't use that one as I am more open to infection, lymphedema, etc.). That may be a separate surgery, or it may not be, if they can fit it in during this big surgery on Tuesday. It seems that it might not be the plastic surgeon's favorite idea to have it installed then, though. We'll see...

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