5 Months in it and still going strong!

THIS Friday, May 4th, marks Meladee's FINAL, 8th Treatment! So incredible to be at this point, and see her strength and tenacity keep her going!

Post Treatment 1 and 2 set the pace for how she would feel for the duration of her Chemo. Nauseous, fatigued, and with many side effects, too put it lightly.

Post Treatment 3, she had her first blood transfusion.

Post Treatment 4, Meladee was placed in the ICU, another blood transfusion and also had her gallbladder removed.

Post Treatment 5, she rode the waves of side effects, and was introduced to new ones (mentioned below).

Post Treatment 6, yet another blood transfusion.

Post Treatment 7, best she felt considering all the usual, and was able to be home with her husband and children sooner than previous treatments.

Send Meladee your prayers and well wishes over these next two weeks as she enters her final treatment day and treatment recovery! She is going to make it through this last treatment with flying colors!

A few thoughts Meladee wanted to share:

Blood transfusions

    My mom calls them my vampire parties. It's funny how familiarity with something can change your perspective. The first time I had to get a blood transplant I was so nervous and apprehensive. Somebody else's blood going into my body? A litttle weird and Can it really be safe? The ER doctor left me to make the decision and I agonized over and over about it. It is amazing how much they help, literally amazing to me. They take a long time because you can't have cold blood go into you too fast or you can go into shock. Watching the blood drip from the IV into my port is a litle weird, in fact, I usually try not to look. But the weirdest thing is that I can taste it. Not fully, but the taste lingers in the back of my throat an don the back of my tongue a little and I can smell it, like internally smell the blood. It has a certain smell and a gritty, salty kind of taste. When Katniss in The Hunger Games talks about President Snow smelling like blood I have a very real and vivid idea of what that is like. Now they can seem almost routine to me, although I never like to have to get anything put into my port.

    Throughout this whole chemo process, my red blood cell count refuses to stay up I have yet to even be at the low end of the normal range. That is one of the reasons I have sturggled with fainting and dizziness and extreme fatigue. When my red blood cell count gets really really low it gets hard to breathe and my head gets so foggy and heavy it's hard to think. I get a blood transfuions andvoila! I can breathe again and walk around without feeling like I am going to fall over. I'm still tired and sick but it makes a world of difference. Now my mom jokes that I might start to like blood transfusions too much! Roland has decided that he is a lot more open to donating blood now that he sees what a difference it can make, and how needed it is.

 

Taxotere and Herceptin

    My second round of chemo consists of Taxotere and Herceptin. The Herceptin specifically targets cells with a specific protein receptor that my cancer cells have. So thankfully, theoretically it does not have the same side effects as the other chemo drugs. Taxotere does though. i am not quite as naseous with the Taxptere but i still have to take my pills once or twice a day, but that is better than every four hours. I am having some neuropathy in my fingers along with some muscle weakness in my hands. My fingernails have developed weird bumps and white moons, and the skin underneath is getting somewhat discolored and blistered. Any bumps to my fingernails hurts, but I haven't lost them yet, although I guess that is still a possibility. My doctor gave me some steroid cream to use on my hands and I am happy to say that although they are still sensitive they have not blistered and peeled again since a little while after the first treatment. My feet did though, but it wasn't as bad as my hands. This drug for some reason makes my eyes water like crazy, and my nose runs a lot too. Each treatment still makes me feel like I have been beaten with a stick and dragged. Every muscle aches, and I get really tired, but overall this round is better than the first round with the adriomyacin and cytoxin. I think the accumulative effect contributes a lot to the fatique and aches, and a lot depends on how well my counts can hold up. One other thing that is weird is that i can now hear my heartbeat  in my left ear almost all the time. It seems like my heart does have to work a little but harder. My resting heart rate is ridiculous, but that could also be due to the fact that I am ridiculously out of shape. Man do I have a lot of work to do when this is all over. But it is nice to have three weeks instead of two between treatments. It gives me a little more time to have "good" days. As of this writing I have one more treatment of Taxotere and Herceptin and then I will continue with the Herceptin for a whole year. The end is coming!

 

How I am looking

    My hair is all gone, except for some rebellious strands that keep trying to grow back. They don't make it past a centimeter or so. My eyelashes are no more. My eyebrows are stubborn, they are hanging on. They have thinned, but they are still there. I don't even have any more nose hairs! Maybe that is TMI but it's true. The one perk of all this is that I have not had to shave, anywhere :) That is one effect that I hope might linger on for a little bit.  

If you remember from a previous post where I mentioned bringing TinkerBell out to help make Meladee some hair, then here is the little fairy hard at work. Meladee is radiant as always!

Get Well Mel!!
We Love You!!

Fighting like a Girl!!

To begin, I think it's best to let you all know where Meladee is with her treatment today so you can understand fully where she has been. Last Thursday, Meladee had her 7th Chemo Treatment. This means she has only ONE more to go, and the date is set for May 4th. From that point on, she will only receive Herceptin which is a drug more targeted at the cancer cells which fight of the Her2Nue (the aggressive protein that her cancer cell have) receptors in her cells. Because it is a more targeted drug, it is a good thing because it should not have the same affects on her as full blown chemotherapy treatment. June marks the next step in her therapy, surgery (Mastectomy and removal of the lymph nodes in her right arm pit), and at this point they will also put in place the breast tissue expanders. Her surgery will take place at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. After recovery from her Mastectomy, she will have radiation treatment followed by breast reconstruction. The later will all take place within the next 9 months to a year. 

The blog last contributed to her health after Treatment 3. A week or so after that post, Meladee was short of breath, trying to converse with her sister, but laying in bed she found she could barely get a breath out and her energy level was the lowest it had ever been. She soon realized her blood counts were taking a hit, and she found herself with a visit to the ER for a blood transfusion. That helped her to regain strength and get back home for recovery before Treatment 4 began. As you will read later in this post, Meladee had a difficult recovery from Treatment 4, life threatening might be a more appropriate term. Once recovered from Treatment 4, Meladee handled Treatment 5 like a champ, and then with Treatment 6, she found herself back in the ER for another blood transfusion. At this point, her Mom so cleverly named these visits to the ER, "Meladee's Vampire Parties". This last transfusion must have been from someone with an abundance of iron. Meladee felt more energized, and entered Treatment 7 like a champ. Now a week out from receiving Treatment 7, she still feels great (considering). 

Get Well Mel!!

We Love You!!

Now for the nitty gritty of Treatment 4....

 

Treatment 4

 

    I was told that the last treatment of A/C would be the worst. So I was preparing myself for it. The two weeks were almost up and, although I was still feeling extremely nauseous and tired and faint, (you know the usual stuff :). I was beginning to think that I was going to make it through the cycle without any major happenings. My kids were both sick and Roland was sick too, with bad colds and coughs I was desperately trying to avoid. I had been on antibiotics for a week and was thinking I was lucky to have not caught what they had. Although, it was with some foreboding that this was all too good to be true that I had arrived at that conclusion. Sure enough, the inevitable happened.

   

     It started out as chills. I was so cold my teeth were chattering uncontrollably and I felt like I couldn't get warm. I was also extremely tired, I went to bed early, although I was having a hard time sleeping because I was starting to have some very intense pain in a rather personal area. I woke up in the night, sometime probably around 1:00 or so, and the pain was so bad there was no sleeping. Throbbing, sharp, burning, never ebbing, unforgiving pain. Though I felt weak, I didn't want to disturb Roland, because he wasn't feeling so well himself and was frustrated about not getting enough sleep. I wrested with the idea of getting up myself but just didn't feel I could do it, the medicine cabinet was what, ten to fifteen feet from my bed, I mean come on, but even sitting up was hard. Finally, I had to wake him up and ask him to get some tylenol for me. He wonderfully did so, but I started feeling intensely nausious. Within a half an hour, I was violently heaving the contents of my stomach, including the tylenol I just took, into to the porcelain god - firehose violently. I barely made it back to my bed. I noticed that I was warm and knew the inevitable, but for some reason tried to convince myself that I should wait until morning. I didn't want to disturb Roland again but had the wisdom to recognize that I was in a bad way, and toughing it out was not going to be beneficial. I mustered the strength to stand up and grab the thermometer from the top of the shelves next to my bed and almost blacked out doing so. Sure enough, I had a fever - 101.8. To be truly and completely honest I think I swore, at least in my head, but I wasn't surprised. I woke Roland up and told and broke the news.

   

    "You don't have a fever," he said. But he took my temperature himself, and then immediately started swearing, which he continued to do as he jumped out of bed and started getting dressed. He knew as well as I did that I was going to have to go to the ER. But of course, I had to call the Doctor just to have them say it to me. We called my brother Matt who was amazing enough to book it over to our house so he could stay with the kids. Roland was trying to get me to put socks on, but I couldn't sit up, I had to lay there while he did it. My head was just spinning, heavy, foggy, and oh, the pain. On a scale of 1-10 this was definitely a 10!

    I had to go to the bathroom so Roland helped sit me up. Then I slid down to the floor and crawled to the bathroom. I didn't make it very far out of the bathroom on the return trip, even crawling, before I just collapsed on the floor. Roland pulled me up, slid a coat around me and carried me out to the car. I will be forever grateful that we live so close to a hospital.

    I was wheeled to a room within minutes of arriving. I could hardly sit up in my wheelchair, I was writhing in pain, bleeding, and by the time they took my temperature it was 105. Right away they were taking blood, hooking me up to fluids, checking my heart, and offering pain killers. The first dose of morphine did not even cut into the pain, so they gave me another, and then another. No dice. So they finally gave me something called dilaudin, which is ten times stronger than morphine. Finally some relief. I mean, I felt like I was going to die. In all reality, I probably could have.

   They wanted a urine sample so they brought me a wheelchair, to go across the room to the bathroom. After an unsuccessful attempt, I tried to get back in the wheelchair but totally blacked out. I couldn't see anything! I was groping around and telling Roland to help me hurry to the bed. "Just get in the wheelchair," he says. "I can't see it." Confused as to why I am not using this necessity, he still tries to get me to sit. "I CAN'T SEE IT. I CAN'T SEE ANYTHING," I say urgently and he whisks me off to the hospital bed before I lose consciousness. Shortly thereafter I am wheeled into the ICU where I spend the next several days hooked up to all kinds of wires, monitors, and other devices.  I was given lots of strong antibiotics, another blood transfusion, and tons of IV fluid. I was also sooooo nauseous. I couldn't keep anything down. They had to give me everything interveiniously. Puking, puking, puking, it was awful.

    My hands were already getting trashed from chemo. I was getting blisters and my skin was starting to peel off and become extremely sensitive. It wasn't supposed to happen until the next regime of chemo, but for some reason I was getting it already. Before I came to the hospital, I was already even losing some mobility with my fingers because the skin was so tight and sensitive, but all the fluids made it worse. I could not close my hands. I could not even bend two fingers on my right hand. It was hard to hold anything like a fork, or a pencil, and I could not open anything. Talk about feeling helpless. But worst of all my ring finger was getting so swollen they had to saw off my wedding ring! That was a long drama!

 

    So what was wrong with me? I was severely neutropenic. What is that? Well we have a lot of different kinds of white blood cells, but the most important ones for fighting infection are the neutrofils. Normal people have a count of around 5,000 or more. Me, mine was 15. Dangerously low. The doctor thinks I had a mild urinary tract infection, some bronchitis and we discovered within a couple days that I also had an infected gall bladder. With basically no immune system, my body had absolutely no way of dealing with any of this.

    Because I was neutropenic and severely susceptible to infection, my kids couldn't come see me, only 12 and up and healthy. There were all these signs on my door about me being at risk to falling, and infection. People had to wear masks and sanitize. I could not have any fresh fruit or vegetables and no flowers. The food was awful anyway, and I just kept throwing up, so I didn't eat much. The nurses were concerned that I wasn't eating anything and the kitchen staff even came up to my room to ask me what I wanted at mealtimes instead of waiting for me to call. My mom and my sister were gracious enough to bring me ramen noodles several times because that's all I felt I could eat. But seriously, they had me on so much IV fluid I don't know how the nurses could be so concerned about me not eating. How could I even have a chance to get hungry? Mostly, I drank apple juice and had cooked green beans. If the nurses had to eat the hospital food I don't think they would eat either! I was so grateful for my family (and Heather) that came to visit me, watch over me, consult with me, bring me things to do, and help take care of my sweet sweet children. My dad gave me a blessing, which was a very sweet experience.

 

    When I was strong enough they moved me from the ICU into the regular part of the hospital. I was so glad to get rid of those wires. Hallelujah!! I still had my IV in my port though. I remember when I was able to stand up long enough to take a shower, all by myself! Freedom!! I had to cover my port and IV with a waterproof cover and stay attached to it but it still felt so free after having to be hooked up and hardly able to move to the left or to the right for so long. After a couple days my white blood cells were high enough that I could undergo surgery to remove my gall bladder, which was conducted thankfully, without any complications. I was ecstatic about being able to take out my IV and take a shower unconnected, all by myself. I was excited and soooo ready to leave the hospital. I mean how does one recover and sleep when you are constantly being "monitored" and woken up by nurses or your IV machine beeping angrily throughout the night. I couldn't wait to get in a bed, a real bed.

 

    Leaving was somewhat bittersweet though, because I wasn’t going home. In order to avoid future hospital stays and to keep me healthy, everyone in my family decided that I needed to be in isolation. I pretty much didn't have a choice. I knew it was for the best, but I ached to be with my kids and home with my husband. My in-laws have been gracious enough to prepare a room for me at their house. My sweet mother in law nurses and takes care of me and I have a bathroom all to myself.  Hand sanitizer and masks are set up for visitors. So it was here that I came to recover from surgery and it is here I come after each treatment until my counts start to go up again and I can go home for a little while. I love my in-laws and they are wonderful to me, but being away from my family is the hardest part of this whole ordeal. But I want to make sure I am around for them in the long run and that means I just can't get sick again. Naomi and Seth had a hard time with the arrangements and still do, but they are adjusting, and they are brave!!

Long time coming...

First and foremost, an apology for taking so long to post an update!! The last couple of treatments for Meladee have been a roller coaster of events, and we have just had time to lay out all of the details so they can be shared online with all of you. As we finalize a few things, here is one post that will warm your heart, and make you smile!

I had the pleasure of visiting Meladee about six weeks ago. During this time we revisited our days in high school. We had her incredible mother-in-law, Janet, cook us delicious meals, and we slept in until 10 some days. We looked at pictures from 10-15 years ago, and laughed about stories from our past. It's amazing how time has helped us develop into who we are as young mothers today! Spending that short week with Meladee at the beginning of March gave me the opportunity to see who she is as a mother and wife. I loved get to spend time with her children and visit with different members of her family. On one special day, Meladee and I took time to capture pictures of her with her two babies. As you scroll down, you will see a wonderful love and bond between them. I hope you enjoy, and we will be back soon with the treatment update!

Get Well Mel!
We Love you!!

This next bit is a special surprise I just shared with Meladee yesterday. It was cut a little short because of the length allowed on my iPhone, but special nonetheless. Meladee did not know I was video taping them. I probably should have titled this blog post: A Whole New World!