Now that I am sufficiently healed from my surgery, I get to start my 6 months of Chemotherapy. Apparently there are lots of chemo medicines...a little fact that I didn't know. I will be using Taxol and Carboplatin with the following schedule: Week 1 - Taxol and Carbo combined; Weeks 2 & 3 - Taxol only; Week 4 - Off! I do expect to lose my hair somewhere between day 14-17. A sweet friend who just finished chemotherapy for breast cancer threw me a hat/scarf party to help prepare for that. It was such a great time to talk with friends and learn ways to cover my soon-to-be bald head! I'm surprisingly ok with losing my hair. Of course, I haven't seen my bald head yet, so I imagine that might change. The good news is that I'll be nice and cool this summer and, for the first time, I will get to experiment with hair styles of all lengths this fall! I just finished my first infusion on Thursday, March 23. I was more nervous for chemo than I was for my ...
I have some great news I want to share! Last week marked the beginning of the 4th month of Chemo. Because I had passed the half-way point, a new blood test was taken to see where my cancer markers were. This is done to make sure that the chemo is doing its job. The cancer marker test for Ovarian Cancer is the CA-125 test. A normal range for CA-125 is below 35. When I was first diagnosed, my score was 668. After surgery, right before I first round of chemo, my score had dropped to 194. As of last week, my latest score is a whopping 32! I haven't actually talked to my oncologist yet...I just pulled this score from my lab report online. When I was in the hospital following surgery, an oncologist came to visit with me and told me that the best outcomes happen when the CA-125 test is in the normal range at the half-way point of chemo. That is what I have been praying and hoping for and I'm so relieved to see that it has happened! I look for...
We really wanted to make sure that this summer was lots of fun and that it wasn't just about cancer and chemotherapy. I was lucky in that I didn't have to work often and my schedule was very flexible. I felt good most of the time, so that meant we got to play! The kids had summer school during the first 6 weeks of summer. This was pretty great because they only went to school from 8-12, four days per week. I would pick them up at noon and then we would go do something for a couple of hours before going home. Common activities included boating, swimming, bowling, miniature golfing, go-carting, going to the library, and holding taste tests to see who had the best onion rings. That honor, by the way, goes to the Tailgater's Grill at Fat Cats. In all fairness, we only tried about 4 places...we'll have to eat more places to be super sure. We weren't able to make our traditional summer trip to Missouri, which was a bummer, but we did have som...
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Love you all
Alice