Me. To other people going through breast cancer treatment. Just hear me out.
Everyone I’ve talked to who is going through this has been going the chemo route or chemo plus radiation. And always surgery. No one gets out of here without at least a lumpectomy. There are many different types of chemotherapy treatments. I was supposed to do neoadjuvant chemotherapy. That means that I would be treated for cancer via chemotherapy prior to surgery. At the time of surgery, the doctor would be looking for the cancer to be gone or significantly reduced in size. Hopefully gone, or what is called a complete pathologic response.
They want this because this is a very aggressive cancer that I have. If it reappears in the future, we need to know that the treatment works.
This chemotherapy regimen would have been much more of an upheaval to my life. I likely would have had three months of AC treatment followed by T, otherwise known as AC-T. AC are drugs called doxorubicin and cyclophosphamide and T is a drug called paclitaxel. It would have been six months of treatment, the same as I am currently doing. The AC would have been given every three weeks for three months, and then the T would have followed as a weekly treatment after that. I think. It’s all jumbled in my head what drug was where when. But the timing is right. Six months, three months on one drug; three on the other; every three weeks; every week.
Chemotherapy treatments can pretty much eat up a whole day. Some require blood work that day or the day before to be sure you are healthy enough. They all involve hair loss and a list of other symptoms including but not limited to: low red and white blood cell counts, infection, nausea, loss of appetite, mouth sores, diarrhea, fatigue, heart damage, neuropathy - this is the one I was most afraid of due to my line of work, it means loss of sensation in parts of the body. I was so afraid of losing feeling in my fingers. I could deal with my feet being numb or something like that, but I use my fingers every day for work. Not an option.
Instead, I’m enrolled in a clinical trial. All of those side effects were listed, except neuropathy, and I’ve had barely any of them. Fatigue, but I’m able to get around that by sleeping 8-9 hours per night. Loss of appetite, but I’ve never had a problem eating. I know that in order to care for myself and keep working, I need food. So, I eat. Even if I don’t want to. My hair is still intact. Including my leg hair since I’m not allowed to shave. It’s getting a little out of control. I had two days where I had some nausea early on. Since then, I’ve maybe had stirrings of nausea, but not bad enough to even take a Zofran. Zofran is an anti-nausea drug that is a cancer patient’s best friend. I’ve take two. I’ve been on talazoparib once a day for 1.5 months.
Talazoparib is a PARP inhibitor. I know I’ve gone over this before, but just to recap: PARP = poly ADP-ribose polymerase enzyme. ADP = adenosine diphosphate.
Explanation from breastcancer.org:
"PARP inhibitors, such as Lynparza (chemical name: olaparib) and Talzenna (chemical name: talazoparib), have been approved to treat advanced-stage HER2-negative breast cancer in people with a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation.
The poly ADP-ribose polymerase (PARP) enzyme fixes DNA damage in both healthy and cancer cells. Research has shown that medicines that interfere or inhibit the PARP enzyme make it even harder for cancer cells with a BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation to fix DNA damage. This makes it harder for the cancer cells to survive. In other words, a PARP inhibitor makes some cancer cells less likely to survive their DNA damage."
So, I’m trying it for lower stages. I meet all the criteria for the trial, fortunately/unfortunately, so we are giving it a shot. And it appears to be working. Instead of hours in a chair getting an infusion, instead I pop a pill every day. The first two months of treatment, I'm required to go for blood work and to see my oncologist every two weeks. After that, it’s down to once a month.
So far I’ve had some low RBC counts, but I feel like this week I should be better on that since I have been feeling pretty good. Or I’m adjusting. Either way, I feel good enough to help put together our epic Halloween display. Maybe not epic, but pretty darn good. I also started back on some workouts yesterday. Admission: I haven’t worked out since I started other than walking the dogs and jumping on my spin bike once. I’ve done the last two days, hopefully I can keep it up this week even though I have a pretty brutal work schedule. It’s a five day a week program, so I decided ‘Monday’ for me should instead be Saturday because I tend to work less on the weekends. So far, so good.
So, yes. I am annoying in that I have to spend less time and am having less side effects. But. I hope that this trial will lead to better and less harsh treatments for others with this particular type of cancer in the future. Who knows? Maybe one day they’ll just treat it with a pill and you won’t have to have a double mastectomy and salpingo-oophorectomy.
That is my hope. I just wish it were the reality already.