Loving...and updates

Loving that my birthday boy settled for a racing car cake instead of Ben 10. With a rainbow surprise inside! Loving this neat little boy who was happy without a party and enjoyed special one on one time instead. Coffee (for me) and hot chocolate and smiley face cookies and a trip to the $2 shop and back home to play. Another whole day with dad, doing BOY STUFF. He was a happy little man. Love his little warm body climbing into my bed every morning and giving me a big squeeze. Love when he hears a cool guitar riff he runs to his room to pick up his guitar and put on a show for us. Love that he takes his Truck magazine to kindy for reading time. Love that he makes everyone feel special with his lovely hugs and kisses and cheeky sense of humour. Love his good nature, easy going friendliness and gentleness. Love that he also takes risks and lives life to the full as all kids should.

Only another year and he will be at school :(
Doing my best to make the most of it.


Other thing...lots of health updates.

Finished Herceptin. YES! One more thing ticked off the list.

Got a call from the breast reconstruction nurse specialist. I'm booked in 4 months to meet with a plastic surgeon to go over my options. Again. We already decided last time I saw a surgeon (before my mastectomy, when we thought I'd have an immediate reconstruction) but I might not be having the same surgeon, so its best to go through the options again. At this stage I'm going for a silicone implant, not the TRAM flap operation. Click on the link if you are interested in what that is. So, roughly six months after that I'll have my surgery, if all goes well (i.e. the waitlist doesn't change). Its great to know I'm in the system now and its within my grasp!

The other cool thing is I got a phone call this morning from the hospital to say they had a portacath removal cancellation, and I was the only person they could find to fill the spot! So I'm booked in for Monday to have this removed. Less than a week after my last infusion, crazy fast! I thought I'd be waiting a few months for that. If you don't know what a portacath is, its a device that was put in my chest during my mastectomy surgery last year and it was so they could get my chemo drugs through this instead of finding veins in my arms. It looks like this...

and this

Me having chemotherapy...

And finally, the other thing that has taken up my brain space this week has been the fact that I have been offered to go on a clinical trial. This is for a new drug called Neratinib which is a tyrosine kinase inhibitor. In short, its a follow on from Herceptin which the drug company Pfizer are hoping will break the blood/brain barrier that Herceptin does not do and lessen the recurrence of brain mets. So I've signed up. I might get the actual drug, I might get the placebo but in either case I take it for a year, and then have four years of follow up. I get looked after really well, as obviously they don't want me to develop any mets while on the study. Funny that...neither do I! Haha. There are side effects. In fact there's a few but I figured I'd sign up and we'll see where it goes from there. Will keep you posted on this.