Get Out

 

Well, it’s been a week… After poopapalooza, Siva had trouble breathing and I had to take her to the emergency vet. We had lift repairs the day before, and the emergency vet is WAY more expensive than a regular visit so…💸💸💸💸😐

She’s ok, but she’s pretty unhappy with the amount of drugs I have to shove down her face hole. She’s still lethargic and sleeping a lot and wheezing, but she seems much better. They think it was just an upper respiratory infection, but the poop debacle may have escalated things.

I did not get my results yesterday, and I finally yelled at my rep a little bit. Today, I finally got them.

Unfortunately, the test was once again positive, and it has jumped from .03 to .12. I completely melted down, and it has been a really difficult afternoon. It sucked even more because we are renting a part of a studio to do aerials, and we were finally having our first session, and that’s when we got the news. It put a damper on what was supposed to be a really fun day.

I tried to contact my oncologist, but she and my beloved oncology nurse were both out today. I ended up calling the breast cancer specialist at Signatera. She was kind of mean the first time I talked to her, but it went better today. I already shared the gist of that phone call in a breast cancer group, so I’m just going to paste it here-

I just spoke with the breast cancer specialist. She said that (even though it sounds huge) going from .03 to .12 is not a significant increase. She said that the number is still extremely low, and she would be concerned about a jump from like .5 to 10, but my .12 still rates as “positive below analytical range” (even though it’s several times higher than my original .03).

She feels that the genetic counselor I spoke with after the first test (who said a positive is a positive and there’s nothing I can do) gave me very basic information, and while it may be appropriate for Signatera, in general, it didn’t factor in all of the additional steps involved with hormone positive breast cancer. 

She can’t rule out the possibility of recurrence-either now or in the near future (of course), but my current circumstances don’t point to that as an immediate threat and she feels that my biggest risk of recurrence, if i have one, will most likely be after I discontinue hormone suppression. There’s currently a guy in NY studying this very thing (residual cancer cells and late HR+ breast cancer recurrence) so hopefully he’ll have it figured out by the time I have to discontinue my hormone suppression!

.12 is too small of a number to be indicative of cancer that is established or growing, and we can realistically assume that the hormone suppression is doing its job unless the number jumps a lot more than this. So… we just have to assume it doesn’t mean anything.

The current plan is to test again in 6 weeks and see what happens. As long as it hasn’t gone to an *actually* high number then I probably just have to test every few months, watch it, and live with it. The one positive is that, if it does go up, we will be able to watch closely and act more quickly than happens for others who have asymptomatic recurrence.

It’s not the news we wanted, but I guess it’s also not the worst possible news? I don’t know. I like to control as many “danger” variable as possible, and this somehow puts me both more in control and less! Maybe it will be good for me…