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Thunderstruck

  • franadivich
  • May 25, 2022
  • 3 min read

I confess that I have a treatment anthem. I listen to ACDC Thunderstruck turned up really LOUD and imagine smiting any stray cancer cells. Join me today for the seventeenth and final time https://youtu.be/v2AC41dglnM


I love singing. I am not accomplished at it but I enjoy it very much. I like to play the car stereo very loudly and sing along.


Many of my favourite songs have a piano intro. It is something I recently noticed. I think the reason I feel a sense of joy when I hear a piano intro is because when I was little I loved “school singing” and choir and we were always accompanied by a piano. It was the same for my ballet lessons - there was a real person playing the piano while we plied, pirouetted or chassed. It is amazing how music can transport you to different places. A piano intro to a song takes me back to childhood and the joyful anticipation of bursting into song or dance.

I didn’t do a lot of singing when I was sick because singing is a happy activity and requires some energy. I am singing a lot now. I am confident the singing will increase over the next six weeks because today is my seventeenth and final intravenous cancer treatment and I have eight weeks off until I commence a year long course of neratinib tablets.

Neratinib is not funded in New Zealand for early breast cancer. A twelve month course of neratinib given after chemotherapy and herceptin based adjuvant therapy to women like me, with HER2-positive breast cancer, significantly reduces the proportion of clinically relevant breast cancer relapses i.e. those that might lead to death (that is it reduces your chances of the cancer coming back elsewhere in your body). The 5-year invasive disease-free survival rate for those who took neratinib in the clinical trial was 90.2% compared to 87.7% in the placebo group. In the sub group with hormone receptor positive disease (me) the results are even better, a 40% reduction in the risk of invasive disease reoccurrence or death, compared to the placebo group (91.2% v 86.8%). I am not ashamed to say that the thought of having a reoccurrence in my bones,brain, lungs or liver fills me with dread. Quite honestly, cancer treatment is intense. It is deeply unpleasant. It hurts. It makes you feel sick. I don’t want to have to go through it again. I will do everything I can to stop it from returning.

So I shall empty my pockets, work hard and pay for the pills. And I will enjoy it.


I’m going to miss the lovely nurses at Auckland Oncology. They are angels. I can comfort myself knowing I will see them fleetingly every 4 weeks when I visit to have my “ovary shot”. Jeez, that thing is brutal (big needle) but less brutal than the alternative which is to have my ovaries removed. I’m not sure why (after all the invasive medical procedures I’ve had) that when I was given the option of an oophorectomy (cool word) I felt like I’d been punched. “Good grief, not my ovaries as well! What else does cancer want to take from me? No, you shan’t have my ovaries.“


Apparently I will receive a call today to arrange the removal of my PortaCath (the catheter in my chest that connects to a line into a vein in my neck).* It is an amazing thing - but it’s ugly, it annoyingly rubs on my seatbelt and every so often I can feel it pulling in my neck. I will be glad to have it out.


Before I start neratinib, Eva and I have planned another trip up North in the next school holidays. I will write about that and how my first few weeks without treatment have felt.

In the meantime, thanks for checking in on me here. My life is returning to a more normal routine. I am however taking more time to look after myself. I sleep 8-9 hours a night, I am still horse riding weekly and doing lots of walking (about 35km a week).


Before I go, I’ll share some of my favourite piano introductions with you. Try not to feel joyful anticipation when the piano starts. Enjoy! Sing along!





* I did receive a call about my PortaCath. It is coming out on Monday. Woo-hoo!!







 
 
 

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