SJ Boehm #mbcwarrior

  Hi all, it feels like I am in a waiting area, trying to keep busy and calm while I wait for my liver to recover from my last attempt at Ribociclib. It looks like I will (hopefully) only have another 2 weeks to wait if my liver continues to improve at the current rate. I have my fingers and toes crossed! I will also be having some new pictures (aka CT scans) done in 2 weeks. Just to check in and hopefully see some more shrinkage! I had my first dose of the Covid vaccine last week, which made me feel extra lousy for a couple of days, but I am back to (my current) normal now. As I am under 50 I had the Pfizer dose, and the side effects I had were not unusual. I chose to have the vaccine as my oncologist encouraged it, as my medication can make me immunocompromised.  To keep busy I have been continuing to declutter, reorganise and have been playing in the garden. Thanks to my husband's awesome Aunt Pauline, plus some help from my parents in law, I now have an organic veggie garden!

  Hello all and first up I apologise for not posting for a little while. I ended up needing a little break over the school holidays. As per my previous blog post, I re-started my fancy pills on Easter Monday. Unfortunately the nausea did come back with a vengeance as did the fatigue. Two weeks after re-starting my fancy pills, I had a blood test to check on my liver. My liver was very grumpy again, hence why I felt so crappy maybe? I am not yet sure what is my new normal on this medication. Anyhooo, my Oncologist has decided my fancy pills and my liver "no likey each other." So we are abandoning the current battle plans and drawing up some new ones. There are currently four different medications in the same family (aka cell inhibitors) as my fancy pills (Ribociclib). Once my liver has recovered (again), I will try another one called Abemaciclib. My husband Phil asked a qualified chemist friend of his about Abemaciclib and from what he read it is a newer (so therefore theore

  Last week I was officially given the ok to resume one of my treatments...Ribociclib (aka my fancy pills). As I have mentioned before, it had made my liver "grumpy" and I had to stop taking it. For approximately the last six weeks I have been have weekly (and on occasion twice weekly) blood tests to check the toxicity of my liver. I have been working hard to get back on this medication because of the impact it has had for other MBC warriors out there, but there is a large part of me that has been dreading restarting also. Mainly due to the nausea and fatigue I felt last time.  This morning was D-day, my Oncologist told me to wait until today so I got to enjoy Easter. I looked at my husband Phil nervously this morning as I was about to pop my first pill and what he said made me feel so much better.... Nothing like a war story to make you feel better! He said "when you are fighting a war, first you cut off the supply lines (my Letrozole does that, it starves the cancer fr

  Learning you have cancer can make you feel powerless and not in control of your own life. However, I have found other ways to take back or feel in control.  #1 De-clutter and re-organising I have been slowly (as my energy permits) been decluttering and re-organising our home. There are a few reasons why I chose to do this, but I am finding even more benefits I did not know about as I slowly take more control of our home!  I have come to realise how much clutter exhausts me, it makes me stressed and is overwhelming. This is the main reason I have not been able to continue my hobby of sewing/dressmaking. After my accident in 2019 my sewing room (aka junk room and place to hoard fabrics) became too much for me. I couldn't even be in the room without feeling stressed and anxious. I also realised I had a problem with hoarding fabric... Although decluttering the sewing room/home office is main the objective, I don't feel in a position to conquer that just now. I am starting in spac

  You might want to get comfy and grab a cuppa for this post... My diagnosis This may be the hardest blog post I will write...I probably have to explain a little background first. Over 15 years ago I felt lumps in my breast, and I went to see a specialist who told me I was feeling "fatty lobules" in my breast. After that I really had no confidence with checking my breasts for lumps. Skip forward to November 2018 and I noticed a dimple in my right breast, it freaked me out so I made a time to see a GP. At the time I did not have a regular GP, every time I found a GP I liked, at the practice I go to, they left! So I made an appointment with a female GP.  It started with a dimple... When I think back I should have got a second opinion, I really didn't like the GPs manner. She examined me and described what she could feel that made me think my breast was just becoming a bit deformed! She told me she didn't think I had anything to worry about, try not wearing a underwire b