First, some fun stuff....at a recent silent auction to benefit Cate's preschool, we purchased a number of items that would make for some summer fun. One of those items was a horse back ride with a local tour company. The kids took their rides today and had a blast. Both hopped off their horses after their 1 1/2 hour ride asking "when do we get to do this again?" It was a fun happening that we wouldn't normally do, which made it extra fun. The guide was truly fantastic and had a good manner with kids. It was just Cate and Christopher and the guide which made for a pretty kid-centric ride where they spent their time searching for that (imaginary) rascal Cowboy Jack, who smells of dirty socks and gets into rascally types of trouble on the trail. Good fun on another gorgeous sunny Alaska summer afternoon.

Other good news (just not nearly as much fun)...I got final pathology back on my tumor and it was more good news for me. The tumor was HER2 negative. The HER2 positive tumors tend to grow fasert and be more agressive -- having an HER2 positive tumor is seen as a poor prognostic feature. Plus, people with HER2 positive tumors need a year of intraveous medicine to battle it. So, by having mine be negative, I shorten the length of time I'll need IV drugs and have a better prognostic outlook and a lesser likelihood of recoccurrence. Double yay!

Also, my dear friend Neveen is now a UCLA Medical Center physician and managed to get me a consult with a friend of hers from the breast cancer department. She totally backed 100% the treatment protocol my physician was recommending, so it looks like we'll do it. It's a regimen of TC chemo drugs (taxotere/cytoxin) which is easier on your heart than some of the other common regimens. I'll have chemo once every 3 weeks for 6 cycles. I should be starting next week and ending in late Oct/early November. Could be worse -- I'm grateful that I'll be done before the holidays and can start thinking about reconstruction and my trip to the Greek Islands that our family will deserve after all this. After that I'll have 5 years of hormone therapy, which while not fun, will seem fairly easy after the rest of the treatments.

My life is quickly filling up with doctor's appointments -- today I saw the surgeon, tomorrow the oncology PA to discuss chemo side effects, Thursday with the genetic counselor about the BRCA testing, Friday with the oncologist to answer any final pre-chemo questions, Monday some radiologic exams they like to do before starting chemo, and somewhere in there I'll have a small OR procedure to insert a semi-permenant port for the chemo drugs and blood work so that they don't have to prick me each time. Then probably next Tuesday we'll start chemo (although we'll get the finalized start date tomorrow -- Tuesday is my guess based on previous discussions with the doctors).