Team Tina

The past few weeks have been a rollercoaster. I have had some of the lowest lows (tough days with the drug-induced hand-foot syndrome) and some of the highest highs (which I will blog about later this weekend).

Today starts round three, which means the oral meds are working. I have mentioned before that Inflammatory Breast Cancer can often times be measured by clinical observation. It affects the skin, so that area of skin is visibly red if IBC is present.

When I asked for a biopsy in early August I had a patchy red area, about the size of a quarter, right where the spitting stitch was removed. By the time I started treatment, two and a half weeks later, the angry redness had spread about seven inches horizontally and four inches vertically, covering a large portion of my chest.
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Today is Pink Out Day at Creed’s school and tonight the Conway Christian volleyball teams will be playing in honor of those who have fought, or are currently fighting breast cancer. When he came home yesterday he very excitedly announced that he gets to wear pink to school today for his mom. I told him I would look for his Team Tina shirt (from my first diagnosis two years ago) so he could wear it today.

After enduring such a long and arduous battle, then being elated a year later when I was declared cancer-free, you can’t even imagine the sheer joy and relief I felt when I packed away all of the pink reminders of those onerous 12 months during treatment.

I wondered, as I placed the shirts, cards, blankets, and several other items given by my sweet people, if there would ever be a time when I could look at the sea of pink in those crates and only think of the love and support I felt when I received those items, and not just the crushing weight of trauma and suffering I experienced during that time.
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We received a bit more information in the last few weeks regarding my recurrence of inflammatory breast cancer and I wanted to give you an update.

As I mentioned in my last post, recent scans show the recurrence is loco/regional, meaning the disease is only in my chest wall “in two tiny lymph nodes”, as quoted by Dr. Beth Overmoyer, the IBC specialist from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, who is overseeing my care with the help of my local oncologist.

Within hours after posting my last update, I received another call from her confirming what we already knew, this was indeed IBC, and again, it is highly aggressive.
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