A Glimpse Into My Healing Sessions
Hello there,
I wanted to write another blog post to fill you all in on my treatment plan or healing sessions, as I like to call it.
With my current diagnosis, the order of events is treatment, a short waiting period to recover, then surgery.
My treatment plan includes both chemotherapy drugs and an immunotherapy drug called Keytruda. They have recently started using this drug that was originally created for lung cancer in triple-negative breast cancer patients. The drug supports your immune system in finding cancer cells and destroying them.
Treatment Plan
12 weeks/1x weekly of Paclitaxel and Carboplatin with Keytruda every third week
12 weeks/1 every 3 weeks of AC: Doxorubicin-Cyclophosphamide with Keytruda
This is a total of 16 healing sessions, of which I started on September 8, 2023. As I write this I have successfully completed my first 6. My first four treatments went pretty swimmingly and I was really grateful for how I was tolerating the meds. I was feeling pretty decent, wasn’t sick, was able to keep up with daily life at home, and was able to get out and about.
But have recently started coming into some severe complications and reactions to the medicine I have been given. This started with my white blood cells dropping right before my 5th treatment, essentially my immune system is knocked down and has no natural fighting power. I am considered to be “neutropenic” and this is a normal occurrence for people with these treatment plans. This has made me withdraw from being in public and stay home so I can steer clear of any illness because it’s really not worth it!
After my 5th treatment on October 5th, I ended up in the ER and was admitted to the hospital for three nights. This was my first time being admitted to the hospital, ever! My body very quickly deteriorated within a few hours of this fifth treatment and it was characterized by severe body aches, chills, fever, extremely elevated pulse, and low blood pressure. Essentially my body went into sepsis and I required active monitoring to ensure my fever stayed down and I could be administered antibiotics and fluids around the clock.
My first hospital visit was not fun, 10/10 do not recommend and give no stars. But some things that brightened my day were my sister-in-law Mollie being there with me while Tim was traveling for work in Atlanta. We had some funny late-night laughs because we had gotten no sleep. The nurse who was admitting me into the hospital asked me about 25 minutes worth of questions and we were already so sleep-deprived. I finally interjected and said “How many more questions are there? Do you also need to know if I live on a normal street or a cul-de-sac?”
We also had some laughs because my blood pressure was being monitored and it was consistently low. Mollie brought me in a sparkling probiotic drink and some Culvers per my request and even though I couldn’t taste the food it made me FINALLY get a good blood pressure reading. Regardless of what they tell you, fast food does have its advantages! Thanks Mollie for sticking by my side and taking care of our dogs while I was down for the count :)
Once Tim came home he was able to visit me at the hospital and bring me food from the outside world. One of my favorites was pancakes from Perkins, those definitely hit the spot. It’s actually quite miraculous how the hospital cafeteria can mess up any food - even pizza, even grilled cheese. These are basic foods that children can make and yet somehow they still make them taste horrible and you’re better off getting food elsewhere. Literally anywhere.
I watched a nature channel with soothing music all day and slept 80% of the time when I was in the hospital. On Saturday I was really down in the dumps and missing my dog. Mochi. I had left him so abruptly on Thursday evening and was wishing I could be with him. Well, you never know if you don’t ask, so I asked the nurse if they ever let people bring their pets. She said normally no, but it’s a really quiet evening and if my dog is well trained it shouldn’t be an issue. She got the okay and next thing I know Mochi was on his way to me with Tim.
It was so fun to have him there to snuggle with me and he did so good. Mochi was at the hospital for probably a good 5 hours. Tim even went out and got us DQ and a Mochi a pup cup to celebrate all being together. When it was time to leave he laid on the floor like this and refused to have Tim pick him up. It was so funny. He just wanted to stay with his mama :)
On my final morning in the hospital I got sick for the first time and was quite unwell. But was happy to be going home with no fever! Over the next few days I just had to take life very slowly and tried to reverse a lot of things that happened to me while admitted to the hospital. I was not eligible for treatment that next week because my labs were so off, so I had an additional week to rest which I was grateful for.
As I went into my 6th healing session on October 19th - I was obviously a little nervous that I would end up back where I just came from, I had some trauma I had to work through and hoped for the best and that last time was just a one-off thing. Lo and behold after being home a few hours I started experiencing the same things but on a much more elevated level - body pains, chills, fever, and eventually troubles breathing. Back to the ER I went!
This time I was only in the ER for 6 hours and ended up being released to manage my symptoms at home. The staff consulted with oncologists and decided that I am not in true sepsis, rather I am having a severe reaction to one of the meds part of my treatment plan. This weekend at home was the worst experience I have had in the journey thus far. The antibiotics I was given were really harsh on my stomach and caused me to be physically ill and not keep food down for a good 4 days. I spent my time sleeping and trying to get down anything I could - chicken broth, applesauce, and my new favorite nutrition drinks. I was very weak and dehydrated and would be winded and fatigued just walking 10 steps.
These moments of darkness truly teach you to enjoy the good days. To rejoice in the simple things such as having an appetite, being able to go outside, being able to drink water, for being able to use the restroom without simultaneously holding a barf basket over your mouth. You know, the little things. I trusted my intuition and stopped taking the antibiotics cold turkey and started to naturally detox myself with Epsom salt baths, acupuncture, enemas, castor oil, tea, foot massages, essential oils, etc. It took me about a full week to bounce back from this one. Ugh, rough.
In the meantime I have met with doctors to discuss my course of treatment moving forward since, as they described, I am “Definitely having significant complications from treatment and need to take a breath.” So I have another bi-week from treatment where I pretend I am on vacation. Trust me, not going into treatment for a week feels like vacation because it’s such an emotional day. I know these breaks ultimately delay my treatment plan but I am grateful for the rest and not being forced to kick my body when it’s already down. I’m grateful for doctors who are so knowledgeable and experienced and can identify that this is likely a reaction to one of the drugs that I am currently on, Carboplatin. These reactions usually appear between the 5th and 7th time someone is introduced to the drug. So it’s impeccable timing that my two reactions took place on my 5th and 6th treatments. If I were to continue to receive this drug my reactions would continue to get worse.
Now, there are two courses of action moving forward:
The least ideal of the two. I go through a desensitization process where instead of being administered this drug for 30 minutes, they slowly administer it over 8 hours while being admitted to the hospital for the day. This would have to take place in Rochester as they don’t offer this in my cozy, small treatment center in Austin. This would hopefully help to introduce the drug slower to my body and ideally not create an intense reaction. I have spoken to someone else whom this happened to and the desensitization did not work and they continued to have anaphylactic reactions, so you just never know - as many doctors have told me throughout this process “everyone is different.”
This is the best option and I hope and pray I can move forward with it! We are going to look at removing this drug from my regimen overall and leave it out over my final 6 treatments of this type. I am scheduled for a breast ultrasound to record and document the change in the mass and if the doctors agree that it is considerable enough we will go ahead with removing this drug and will focus on the one other drug over the next 6 weeks.
Lastly one more little bit of news, this time about my liver. When you are going through treatment and receiving all of these drugs you are watched like a hawk because these drugs attack everything. I tell people that they really aren’t smart drugs, they don’t really know what they go after they just attack everything. Good bacteria in your gut, hair, female reproductive organs, doesn’t matter - the drugs will attack it. Well, the immunotherapy drugs have found my liver and have given me immunotherapy-based hepatitis. So right now I am on steroids to reduce the inflammation in my liver and get it back to a good spot before we can reintroduce the immunotherapy drug again.
So right now I am on a sabbatical from all things except healing.
This was a long post, but one that had to be written. In future posts, I’d love to share more about the treatment process, my experience with cold capping (a process to prevent hair loss), and some of the amazing people who have come to treatment with me thus far 🙂
Stay tuned!
Xo, Breanna
