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Once diagnosed, a PET scan is done to find out if the cancer has spread. Before getting mine, I thought about getting chemotherapy and a mastectomy, and then my life would go back to normal. But my positron emission tomography scan revealed that the cancer had already spread, it was metastatic. It wasn’t until I Googled it that weekend that I realized that metastatic breast cancer is stage IV breast cancer, which has a life expectancy of two to three years. That was the moment when I realized I was terminally ill.
My doctors suggested that I take hormone therapy and “enjoy the time I had left.” My husband and I couldn’t believe they could say that. I got second and third opinions, and they were all different. I finally got onto an aggressive treatment course that included chemotherapy to shrink my large tumor; then we would decide if I should have a mastectomy. I was in bed for three months. I lost all my hair, eyebrows and eyelashes. I was hospitalized several times during chemotherapy because I had a fever, so I was isolated and I had to stop treatment. My daughter was so attached to me at the time and there were some days when she would just come and sit next to me on the bed and it broke my heart because she was so afraid that she would sit next to me; I didn’t want her to be anywhere near that toxicity that was probably coming out of my body.
Fortunately, my tumor shrunk significantly after chemotherapy. I opted for surgery, followed by radiation. It burned my skin so bad I could barely put clothes on. But I got over it. I took one day at a time.
