Hi Cazilion,

Welcome to Cancer Chat. I'm sorry to hear of the situation with your daughter - this must be a lot to process and I am sure it is tough with not being close.

It sounds like she has some good support around her. Hopefully it won't be long to get all the information you need, which may help a little in terms of understanding next steps.

I hope that this forum can be of some support to you. We are always here if you need it, and it is often helpful simply to write things down, and to reach out to others.

My reply will give your post a little boost, so a few more people should see it and so hopefully you'll get more replies. You can also search the forum (using the bar at the top of the page) for other relevant discussions and people to connect with, if you'd like to.

Wishing you all the best,

Ben
Cancer Chat Moderator

Thank you Ben.  Very helpful 

Hiya.

Some of this will come across as me teaching you how to suck eggs, so apologises in advance.

My wife is 3 years out from her triple + treatment. She was stage 3, grade 3. It was found in 2 of her lymphs and using the oncologists own words, was pretty extensive and was as bad as it gets as far as the curative prognosis goes. She had everything thrown at her. EC and docetaxel (nasty stuff).

During her EC chemo she found it a breeze relatively speaking. It made a dent in the tumours, but wasn't anything amazing for her personally. Then came the docetaxel. It made her ill after each and every cycle. So much so, she was about to get taken off it. But they decided to proceed with the last one. Come her final post chemo scans, the docetaxel had completely obliterated the cancer. She had had a full response. She was originally down for a mastectomy, but due to her complete response, it was downgraded to a lumpectomy. They had to reinsert markers before the op because the old markers were no longer relevant. They couldn't find anything on her scans. The pathology after the op found no cancer cells.

She got around 30 radiotherapy sessions and also thigh injections for the HER 2.

She's still classed cancer free to this day. Yeah, she's had scares, but they turned out to be nothing but scar tissue and cysts due to her treatment. She's on tamoxifen and will be for the next 7 years. She's had some issues, but not many. She found the worst part of the treatment was the insomnia due to the hormones all being depleted. She struggled badly with that. The steroids didn't help matters either.

Your daughter sounds like she's starting off in a better position so her treatment may involve less chemo etc.

Hiya.

Some of this will come across as me teaching you how to suck eggs, so apologises in advance.

My wife is 3 years out from her triple + treatment. She was stage 3, grade 3. It was found in 2 of her lymphs and using the oncologists own words, was pretty extensive and was as bad as it gets as far as the curative prognosis goes. She had everything thrown at her. EC and docetaxel (nasty stuff).

During her EC chemo she found it a breeze relatively speaking. It made a dent in the tumours, but wasn't anything amazing for her personally. Then came the docetaxel. It made her ill after each and every cycle. So much so, she was about to get taken off it. But they decided to proceed with the last one. Come her final post chemo scans, the docetaxel had completely obliterated the cancer. She had had a full response. She was originally down for a mastectomy, but due to her complete response, it was downgraded to a lumpectomy. They had to reinsert markers before the op because the old markers were no longer relevant. They couldn't find anything on her scans. The pathology after the op found no cancer cells.

She got around 30 radiotherapy sessions and also thigh injections for the HER 2.

She's still classed cancer free to this day. Yeah, she's had scares, but they turned out to be nothing but scar tissue and cysts due to her treatment. She's on tamoxifen and will be for the next 7 years. She's had some issues, but not many. She found the worst part of the treatment was the insomnia due to the hormones all being depleted. She struggled badly with that. The steroids didn't help matters either.

Your daughter sounds like she's starting off in a better position so her treatment may involve less chemo etc.

Thank you so much for replying. And so glad to hear of the great response your wife had to treatment.   Do you mind me asking how old she was at diagnosis ?   My daughter(36)  has the MRI result next week so we will know treatment plan 

very best wishes 

Thank you so much for replying. And so glad to hear of the great response your wife had to treatment.   Do you mind me asking how old she was at diagnosis ?   My daughter(36)  has the MRI result next week so we will know treatment plan 

very best wishes 

Hi, my wife was 49, but pre menopause. Hence, her being on tamoxifen. She had a biopsy last year, which showed she was still more pre menopause than menopausal. It's all confusing to me.

Again, you'll probably know all this because of your profession and your daughter's profession, but things we wish we knew before treatment was is to have a very soft toothbrush at hand should mouth issues start. My wife had a bona fide baby one. She also began to get altered taste, and she found oranurse toothpaste (Bought from Amazon) a Godsend. Mint hurt her mouth badly and the taste was also awful. This toothpaste is made for people going through chemo, suffering from altered taste etc. It's tasteless and doesn't sting.

Be prepared for the insomnia. We went into the cancer diagnosis ignorant. We thought cancer = fatigue. How wrong we were. It was the opposite.

Do let us know how her mri goes. I'm genuinely rooting for your daughter. Once the mri results are in, we found things calmed down a lot on the mental front. She will have her treatment plan to focus on and the not knowing, which is awful mentally, lifts somewhat.

Thankyou  I’ll keep in touch. Really helpful message.