cancer – Page 5 – Pink Stinks

What is Triple Negative Breast Cancer? Hint: Not a Lottery Win.

It’s also not as terrible as the Internet searches would have you believe. Here’s the lowdown:

It’s a breast cancer that has no hormone receptors, and therefore currently no targeted treatment.
It’s a rarer type – 15-20% of breast cancers are triple negative.
It’s more common in African-American and Latina women. Diagnosis and treatment equity are a real need.
It has a “worse prognosis,” but if you are a newly diagnosed TNBC (triple negative breast cancer) sister reading this, know that it is a hotbed of research, and new treatments are coming out all the time. Old statistics are not your friend. There is hope.
It is aggressive and tends to spread/grow more quickly than the other types.
It has a higher rate of recurrence, mostly within the first three years.
It tends to be higher grade (more quickly and aggressively proliferative) and is also discovered at later stages.
Due to its high recurrence rate, most treatments tend to include chemotherapy. Good news: Chemotherapy tends to work very well for TNBC.
Like all other cancers, it stinks.

What Triple Negative Breast Cancer is Not:

A death sentence.
A slow moving, hormone-receptor positive breast cancer for which targeted treatments like Tamoxifen are available. (Although: some TNBC tumors have slight estrogen-receptor positivity, and so at times TNBC patients are prescribed Tamoxifen.)

In talking about this type of breast cancer in my support group and in the world at large, I often find myself having to place TNBC on a hierarchy of ease-of-treatability types. This is understandable. The world of treatment changes constantly, and clinical trials and subtypes and genomic testing are – happily – complicating and more specifically targeting treatments to every woman’s benefit. Yet: TNBC almost always comes out the worst, is still, in some circles, considered the diagnosis to deliver with a sigh and a pause, and Google/goggle/ogle/oogle aka do not Google will only offer doom. Don’t do it.

So, if you have it, I welcome you with open arms to this most unexpected club. We’re a rarer sort, part of the “danger” side of breast cancer. I think of us as the Austin Powers version:

danger-is-my-middle-name

Except we have better teeth.

Yeah, baby.

Joy? With Cancer?

There’s a dairy company in the Bay Area called Berkeley Farms, and one of their milk carton slogans is, “Farms? In Berkeley?”

I will now co-opt it. Joy? With Cancer?

The answer, sisters and brothers, is hell yeah. Because fuck cancer and its thievery. If you’re in treatment, there can come a level of exhaustion like low tide before a tsunami that is so deeply and utterly draining that you cannot see any shore. The dry and distant ocean floor, broken sea shells, rotting kelp, driftwood, spaced between long distances of drying sand–the metaphorical and barren landscape for even getting water becomes a distance so far and difficult that rest and floating in a haze of whowhatwhere is the only option. And that’s just the first few days.

But I digress.

We are talking about joy. I am talking about the resurgence of fresh water, when the tide returns, when some semblance of normalcy comes back to the body.

It is summer vacation, and I’m so grateful to have this time with my daughter. She’s entering high school next year, which means that the needs and tendings of little-kid childhood are receding. They will always be there, as they are all of us, but there is a shift. A shift outward, as in looking out to sea. In this spirit, the two of us went to the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve yesterday. This is in Moss Beach, CA, south of San Francisco. The reserve is not well known, but it has some of the best tide pools I’ve ever seen. Such was yesterday that we saw harbor seals, anemones, European green crabs, and one native red rock crab that snatched another small hermit as it attempted to scuttle free.

The day was grey, overcast, perfect.

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The rocks were slippery but the pools beckoned.

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And afterwards, we took a hike along the bluff. Always I slip back into metaphor – I can’t help it. The small gaze, the larger. The bluff and the pool. But as we walked along the edge I couldn’t help feeling grateful for all of it – the water, the land, even the dark cloud cover that offered a kind of comfort against being too brightly lit. Who can take constant light, after all? The risk is of burning.

We continued, found some beautiful trees.

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And then took some time to sit under them.

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Joy, I think, doesn’t have to be noisy.

Not Glass

3:26 AM.

I woke up to the crack and touch of an ice window breaking.

As if under water.

My CT scan is next week.

full frame shot of snowflakes — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I Remember.

Flowers on the windowsill. Such pleasure in their colors and blooms.

Yesterday a haze of exhaustion. Wandering. Up and down stairs.

Water.

My mind a sluice with this thought, that. No order.

Post-infusion low counts and a ton called not going on my belly. Aka: sit down. Aka: not today.

Taxotere. Cold slide into my veins and killing the quick cells. Do your work.

How the sun, beautiful wanderer, lights up all the kitchen jars and vases like a song through glass. I can almost hear it.

Oh, warmth. Oh, living.

And arrival. Here now.

What else was it that I wanted? What else did I ever ask for?