I’m in the process of fighting cancer for the second time. It’s breast cancer recurrence triple negative. The definition of triple negative breast cancer, from the Macmillan website:
Breast cancer cells may have receptors (proteins) that hormones or a protein called HER2 can attach to. A specialist breast cancer doctor takes a sample of cancer cells during a biopsy or surgery to test for these receptors. If these receptors are found, you are usually treated with hormonal or targeted therapies.
Triple negative breast cancer does not have receptors for hormones, or HER2. This means treatment with hormonal or targeted therapy will not work.
Chemotherapy, along with surgery and radiotherapy, is the most effective treatment for triple negative breast cancer.
Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) is sometimes described as a faster growing type of breast cancer. This may make you feel worried about it coming back. But the risk of it coming back depends on the same factors as any other type of breast cancer.
Triple negative accounts for 10% to 15% of breast cancer types.
Let me say that you get a whole lot of information thrown your way while going through cancer treatment of any kind. It’s good to write it down. Most of my consultants would print off information to give me so that I could read it at home when my brain wasn’t spinning.
The treatment that I had when I was diagnosed back in 2020 was 6 cycles of FECT-T chemotherapy, then a single mastectomy and lymph node removal, and then 3 weeks of radiotherapy. With this second occurrence, surgery is out because of where it is located and I can’t have any more radiotherapy on that side. My first line of treatment is Chemotherapy and Immunotherapy. For chemo, I am having nab paclitaxel, every week for 3 weeks, then a week off. For the immunotherapy, I am having pembrolizumab once every three weeks. It’s an intense regime and sometimes my immunotherapy falls on my week off. Sometimes I have both chemo and immunotherapy on the same day, which kind of kicks my butt. Immunotherapy can only be given for up to 2 years. Chemotherapy is ongoing until it either stops working or my body can’t handle it anymore. If that happens, we move to a second line of treatment, but that hasn’t been discussed yet.
I started treatment on June 2nd, the day before my birthday. So it’s been 6 months of treatment so far. I’m on my second round of chemo cycles. I had the original 12 cycles. Now we are repeating that. I had a scan in October and that came back good. The nodules of cancer they saw in the last CT scan are not showing now and there doesn’t appear to be cancer spread anywhere else. It’s a type of remission. The cancer cells are still there trying to make new tumours but the chemo is killing them off before they can do that and the immunotherapy is helping my body fight it too. It takes a toll on you over time though, I’m not going to lie. I’ll start a new post on that. There are so many different things to talk about, like PIC lines, coping with others, coping with your feelings, and dealing with side effects. I’ll do my best to touch on these subjects and any others that you have questions about along the way.