A woman with a plan

After seeing my oncologist my head was spinning. They sat me down for hours and explained EVERYthing. I'm doing neoadjuvant chemotherapy, which for the rest of us means chemotherapy before surgery. Then I will have surgery, and then radiation. Why chemo first, you ask? Since I am young, my cells are dividing pretty quickly which means that the chemo will be more effective. The chemotherapy works by stopping quickly dividing cells, which is why hair loss ends up being a side effect. Speaking of side effects, the oncology nurses explained the many many side effects that I will be dealing with as I go through this. They also gave me a fistful of prescriptions to get filled to manage the nausea.

The next steps are to get a PET Scan to see if the cancer has metastasized, and to get an Echocardiogram to see if my heart can handle the treatments

My chemotherapy drugs of choice:
Adriamycin and Cytoxen (for four treatments, two weeks apart)
Taxotere (for four treatments, two weeks apart)

My anti-nausea drugs of choice:
Emend, Phenergan, Zofran, Decadron, Ativan (optional)

Baby got background info

I've had a lump for awhile (August is as far back as I remember because I had it on my 28th birthday) but when I went to see my OB/GYN about it he said "Oh, I don't feel it now. It's probably because you drink too much caffeine. You know that new tea place opened up in the mall? Girls drink tea and they don't realize it has a lot of caffeine in it." I thought to myself "You know what? I do drink an insanely large amount of Diet Coke" so I gave up my BELOVED Diet Coke for two grueling weeks. In those two horribly terrible Diet Coke free weeks I started getting some pain. I went back to my OB/GYN and I said to him "No sir, something is wrong". He thought it was an inflammation and an abscess (which is extrememly rare in women who aren't breast feeding) so he put me on antibiotics and sent me for an ultrasound (where they ended up doing a mammogram as well).

The report from the mammogram and ultrasound seemed to agree with him that it was an inflammation and abscess, so the OB/GYN went on vacation and referred me to a surgeon to have the abscess drained. I saw the surgeon on friday 11/20 and when he reviewed the films and the symptoms he told me that it didn't look like an abscess. He tried to get me in for an MRI friday afternoon but the radiologist said "Pssshaw, my weekend has already started" so Monday morning bright and early at 7AM I had an MRI and that's when they found my swollen lymph node (but it still wasn't entirely clear what was going on).

Monday at noon my surgeon did a biopsy and Tuesday 11/24/09 at 4pm he called with the results. I was positive in both my lymph node and my breast for "Poorly Differentiated Ductal Carcinoma".