Which Cancer is what now?

Did you know there are different types of breast cancer? I didn't until April. So which do I have? The kind that is harder to treat of course.

My cancer is called Invasive ductal carcinoma. It is triple negative as well. What does that mean you ask!? Invasive means it is aggressive. It likes to spread fast. Ductal means it is formed in a milk duct. Carcinoma means cancer. Triple negative is the bad part (worse part?). It means it is not responsive to Estrogen, Progesterone, or HER2. But that sounds like a good thing right? Nope. It means they don't know what causes this type of cancer to grow. So therefore they don't have a clear cut way to make sure it stays the eff out of me when we are done. It has a higher recurrence rate. And when it comes back, usually it isn't in the breast. So basically it sucks.

They only really discovered this type of breast cancer about 10 years ago. So it is still relatively new. Which means they don't know how to really deal with it. So when you hear about breast cancer, and ways to reduce your risk, it does NOT apply to triple negative. In fact they believe that the more pregnancies you have, the higher risk you have of developing it. And I breastfed my first for 13 months and my second until about 6.5 months when I was forced to quit to fight this tumor. I'm young, which is also a risk factor for 3- cancer. And for some reason, it has a higher likelyhood of being found in African American young women. The highest rate of trip - cancer I read was from young women from Nigeria. Weird huh? I'll link articles later when I find them again.

But this is why I am doing neoadjuvant chemotherapy. (What does that big ol' word mean?) Neoadjuvant means that I am doing chemotherapy before they remove the tumor surgically so that we can see how the tumor responds to the chemo. Hopefully we will end up with a total pathological response (the chemo will completely kill the tumor). But at this point I would be damn happy with just partial pathological response. Talking to Dr. M last week we discussed continuing chemo after surgery. We most likely will, at try gemcitabine, which when said sounds a heckuva lot like Jim Bean. Which got us into a long discussion about what type of drinks we like. For the record, I could down a million Malibu and Pineapples because they taste delicious. In fact if I could find a bottle of Malibu that was alcohol free, I would be the happiest person EVER! Seriously, its that delicious. I could also be persuaded into drinking some B-52s. Kahlua, Baileys, Cream, um yum! What was I talking about?