Eve won £300 on routlette in a bookies the other day (don't ask) so went and bought a pram today so my job when I got home was to try to figure out how to make the shit recline. Thank you, Fat American Lady who did the youtube review that finally revealed the prams secrets. Oh, and today I found out the Matylda is spelt like that which is "the Polish way" aparently. If my child doesn't grow up to sing in some operatic metal band with a name like that I'll be happy
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Cancer news wise, there was no wig for either of us unfortunatly, since Eve cut her hair short it stopped coming out and I got bored of waking up and having to shave my head. The hair on my legs and armpits has finally reached a length that I'm no longer embaressed about and that doesn't encourage awkward questions from random people.
We have the last chemo coming up on the 20th and another scan for the baby on the 15th (I think). I'm pretty sure they're going to ultrasound the booblump again to see how the chemo is getting along; after our 3rd session we had an ultrasound and the lump had shrunk to 75% of its original size (using math I worked this out to be a reduction from 4cm to 1cm. Feel free to correct.) so will be interesting to see how the last three cycles have hit it. Overall the all the various doctors we've spoken too see pretty happy about the size of the thing and how its reacting to the chemo.
The cancer has also been confirmed as being tripple negative (which we had suspected anyway) which means it doesn't react to hormones (progesterone, estrogeon and HER2 I think) which is both a good and bad thing; if it had been hormone receptive we would've had to terminate the pregnancy (probably) as it would've grown as big as the Death Star with all the extra estrogeon floating around. It also means that there isn't any on-going medication they can give us, so once we're finished with all the treatments they can only monitor us to see if the cancer comes back. These types of cancer are generally more agressive (which could be why we never noticed it before) but also react strongly to the chemo, kind of a good news/bad news thing. As a reaction to this, we are going to be having 4 more cycles of a different type of chemo after all the other treatments (details below) just to finally make sure the shits gone and reduce the risk of it coming back.
Merging baby news with cancer news, there is every likelyhood that the baby will be induced early (from 15/11 to about 25/10) so that Eve can resume treatment. We haven't been given any definitive answers from anyone yet, but I think the schedule is something like this;
Late October - Baby comes
Early Nov - surgery to remove the remains of the lump and the footprint (they want to remove the lump and the original area it ocupied as a precation).
Mid/late Nov - Radiotherapy (from what I'm reading about, this shit kicks your ass, not looking forward to this at all). Unbelivably, the baby can still breast feed up to this point (though obviously not out of the irradiated boob), athough I think after this they need to seal the milk ducts or some shit for some reason or other, I'll get this clarified as I can remember it being mentioned but can't remember why or by whom.
Dec - First of 4 new chemo cycles. In normal cases, you'd have 6 cycles of chemo, 3 FEC (Father Ted will never be the same for me) cycles and 3 TAC cycles. The FEC is relativly mild and the TAC is hardcore shit with some gnarly side effects (none of this slight hair loss shit, TAC can make you anemic and your fingernails can fall out). Due to the pregnancy and the doctors not wanting to risk baby, we've had 6 cycles of FEC as the side effects are generally more mild. The treatment starting in December is to make sure there aren't any cancer cells remaining, so they're using the big guns at this point (I used the phrase "dust off and nuke it from orbit, its the only way to be sure" to one Doctor and she said it was an apropriate analogy).
March - Treatment finishes and we're set free in the big wide world to fend for ourselves. At this point Eve may get some plastic surgery on the NHS to make both her boobs the same size (they haven't said if they'd be making the cancer boob bigger or the non-cancer boob smaller, my head says the latter, my penis hopes for the former). We've met the plastic surgeon a couple of times and she seems like a nice lady, apart from the fact she was almost a little bit too complimentary to Eve's boobs. Hopefully this means she'll be extra careful when she's performing on her and won't leave any foreceps inside her.
Feel free to ask questions or whatever, there will be a test to follow.
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