The Olson Family

We had a wonderful trip to San Diego and I will probably get around to posting something about that later.

I saw both of my doctors (oncologist and plastic surgeon) this week and we have decided to start chemotherapy right away and when that is over (in 20 weeks!!) then I will have my implants placed and get these uncomfortable tissue expanders removed. Then I will do my radiation after that. Whew!! There is a good chance that I will be 31 when that comes.

I am a little nervous to be starting chemo. It was always a far away thought for me. I will start chemo later…..after this or that….. Now that I have a start date I am feeling a little anxious. I know that I need to do this and that we will get through it and one day it will be a distant memory but that doesn’t mean I am excited about it. I have some hope that it will not be as bad as I have heard it can be. I am young and have no health issues so that is a big plus. My doctors are all saying that I can handle it so I’ll take their word for it. My first chemo day is next Friday, June 8th. That means I have 9 days to fit in a lot of cleaning and fun activities. I don’t know how much of that will get done this summer so I will do as much as I can while I can. We are making a summer bucket list of fun so when we are having a good day we will do something on the list. You know how to-do lists go but it would be fun to do most if not all of the things on our list.

Wish me luck. Continue reading →

Things are moving along alot faster now than the past few months. I don’t know if that is a good thing. Today I went to get an echocardiogram done. It’s basically an ultrasound of the heart to give the doctor’s a baseline since the chemo meds are hard on the heart. I will have more of these through treatment to make sure it’s not doing too much damage to my ticker.

I was doing some research on my chemo regimen and that it is also called “the red devil” because it is really nasty. So that didn’t make me feel very good. I don’t want to be taking something called that. Yuck!

Tomorrow I go back to the surgery center again to have a chemo port put in. This will be in my chest right under the collarbone and will feed into my heart. This makes it so that I don’t need an IV everytime that I get chemo and saves my veins. It will be nice for my next reconstruction surgery too. I’m glad to get some of these things overwith so we can move forward quicker. I just hope that I will not be too sore and bandaged up to interfere with our vacation next week. We are going on our family trip to San Diego to go to legoland and sea world and much more. We are all very excited and I was determined to go no matter what. I’m glad that we are going and know that it will be a lot of much needed fun and relaxation. If that is even  possible with 3 little ones in a hotel and restaurants for 6 days.

I wasn’t really nervous about going to the oncologist today to get my test results. I was kinda excited to finally know all the pieces to the puzzle and to know what was going to happen this summer. I was quite emotional though once I was in the room with the nurse practitioner. First of all, I had to wait a month since my last visit so all the tests could be finished. So when I get there today about 10 minutes before my appointment to check in and they tell me that I am not on the schedule today or for anyday for that matter. The secretary said she remembed putting it in the computer but it was not there anymore. I was a little upset that I might not get in today but luckily they squeezed me in with the nurse practioner to go over everything. And she was great and so nice.

The test results were good and bad. The BRCA(genetic) test was neg so that is really good news for my kids and siblings. (And my ovaries, since I would have removed them if the test was positive). But my oncoDx test came back with high risk results and showed that I am triple negative. Which means that I will need aggressive chemotherapy followed my radiation. To be specific if anyone is interested, my regimen is called dose dense ACT. There will no longer be hormone therapy though since I am triple negative and it is not sensitive to estrogen. So this is going to be a long summer but it is definately worth it all. I still have one more surgery to finish the reconstruction before the chemo starts but they would like me to start the chemo by or around June 13th so things are going to be happening pretty fast now.

I have already bought some cute hats on etsy and have a couple patterns to make some too. I’m okay with it all after thinking about it. It just seemed like the past 2 months I have been feeling great and living life pretty much like normal. Now the reality is setting in and it sucks but it is what it is.