It does not matter how healthy you look. It does not matter if your hair is growing back or you walk a little faster or manage with just one nap a day now.
It does not matter if any of those things are true, your cancer can be worsening.
As I have described here before, metastatic breast cancer is characterized by resistance to therapies. If a treatment works in the first place (and according to my oncologist, most have about a 30% chance of initial success), the cancer will almost certainly become resistant to it and it will cease working. This resistance will happen time after time. This has happened numerous times to me already. I have had some treatments not work at all (Taxol, Fulvestrant+clinical trial drug GDC-0032) while others worked for a few months and then would not work any longer (Xeloda, Aromasin+Afinitor) .
Once again, this resistance has happened. Carboplatin and Gemzar did their work starting in March and did it well, bringing me back from a very dark place this Spring. After 9 complete cycles, though, they are no longer working. It is time to move on.
Moving on is scary. It means being in freefall as we use educated guesswork to decide what agent(s) to try next.
The good news is that I was officially approved to receive palbociclib from Pfizer under their expanded access (compassionate use) program. I will be able to get this drug before it receives final approval by the FDA and therefore before it is on the market sometime in the next year. There is no guarantee this drug will work (alone or in combination with other drugs that are on the market already). It is just one more thing to try.
There are still final bureaucratic hoops to jump through, though, and I won’t have it for at least a few more weeks. This presents a problem: I need a new therapy now. I cannot safely be without treatment for that period of time. It also is best for me to be in a state of control when I start it; the higher a cancer load I carry the harder it would be if what the drug does is provide stability rather than cancer regression. Stability is considered success in metastatic breast cancer drugs. Just keeping things the same, preventing cancer progression, is good. This is considered “success” in using a drug for metastatic breast cancer. However, if you start at a very high cancer load, that stability may be quite intolerable. My oncologist and I feel it is best to have that load brought down (not just held steady), and we don’t know if this drug is a workhorse like that. We can’t count on it to be.
I’ve known for the last week that things were probably over for this chemo. We had tried a higher dose of both drugs already without success. I adjusted to the news over the weekend and yesterday I started on a new chemotherapy regimen. Navelbine is given through my port as an IV “push”; it’s just one syringeful that is given in about 30 seconds. Having a port is really helpful for this one because it is very irritating to veins if you do not have a medi-port implanted in your chest like I do (the port is completely under my skin, it is a lump about the size of a nickel and is accessed with a special needle by the nurses. They can take blood from it, give medication and chemo through it the way you would with an IV except you don’t have to use an arm vein). We are initially planning on a schedule of two weeks on, one week off, but that may change as we go. And of course, if it isn’t working, we’ll have to try something else.
I’m having some other problems now that the cancer is growing so that has been a challenge. Side effects don’t just stop the minute you stop taking a drug. And moving right on to another one means there is no break. It is what is needed though. The good thing is that if you find something that works (like the Carboplatin and Gemzar did for me), they can do astounding things to kill the growing cancer and bring it back under control.
Metastatic breast cancer is like Whack-a-Mole: cancer pops up in places and then can often be whacked back down. If you’re lucky you can play this game for a little while as it takes up residence in different bones and organs. We’ll see how successful we are this time. This is always the hardest time for me mentally: living with the uncertainty of trying to find a new regimen, trying to find something that works, knowing right now there is nothing.
But this is the choice I have made in choosing to treat my cancer. That is the nature of this disease. These are not heroic measures. This is what treating metastatic breast cancer is.
And so we go… onward.
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