The numbers are in. Based on my oncotype score (a measure of receptiveness to chemo) I might, by very slight statistical margins, benefit from chemo.

I was tempted to just write I’m getting chemo, because that’s also true. It is a shorter, easier story.

One doctor’s “we probably took all the cancer out!” is another doctor’s “we have to assume that there is still some in you.” So I’m getting chemo because the oncologist I’m seeing recommends it (and a second oncologist says there’s really no way of knowing.) I’m getting it because there’s no way to know if there are a few breast cancer cells wandering my body that my immune system won’t get rid of unassisted. I’m getting chemo because I hope to live for a long time without breast cancer returning.

But ugh, chemo is also poison, so “taking chemo” means taking a ton of medicine, probably more than I’ve taken in my whole life combined, just to combat side effects. It means injecting myself 5-10 days in a row to boost my immune system, which is dealing with a side effect of the chemo, and then a drug to combat the side effect of those injections.

I feel strong enough. I can deal with the next three months — I will be taking a relatively low dose of chemo compared to others — but I’m more scared of the long term side effects. I know the risks are relatively low (and I see you, amazing humans reading this, who are living life beautifully and fully post-chemo), but shit. I just wish I didn’t have to do this.

Back to the brilliant Anne Boyer’s The Undying:

Cancer feels quaintly catastrophic in the manner of the previous century, the one from which my cancer’s treatments are carried over, as are its causes. It is as if I am both sick with and treated by the twentieth century, its weapons and pesticides, its epic generalizations and its expensive festivals of death.

If you want to know how I feel right now, those two lines sort of sum it up. Fuck the ways we’ve made our planet toxic, and the ways we’ve refused to clean up our mess.

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If you speak cancer and want that medical language —

My oncotype is 15. If there weren’t those few thousand cancerous cells in the lymph node, if I was postmenopausal, they wouldn’t recommend chemo for stage 1B, ER+ HER2- breast cancer.

I’ll be getting the T-C chemo combo, 4 doses every three weeks regimen.

I won’t get radiation.

I will start hormone therapy when the chemo is done.

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If you want to know what this means for us as a family — the next few months look really hard. I’m more scared of Lucas’s spinal fusion surgery than I am the chemo. At some point, with his permission, we’ll write about that. The short version is that Burke and I are nervous that he’s so big that his post-op care is going to be really challenging for all of us. Just moving him around, with a huge wound in his back and the accompanying pain, feels terrifying, and he relies on us to move him all day.

We will ask more from you, and soon. This afternoon I have a chemo teaching appointment. Monday we’ll have a pre-op appointment with Lucas’s surgeon. After that we’ll create a meal train and try to predict what we need.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for your love.