[RobinP]

I find myself coming into the Herceptin war game late as a her2 player, having been diagnosed with bc nearly 4 year ago. And yes, my oncologist is finally tentatively allowing me to begin Herceptin next year. The big issue is timing, a year, 9 weeks two years forever. The Finnish trail speaks volumes to me, big gains and little risks. This is particularly interesting to me being an er-,pr-, T1a, N0(i+), M0 gal with fairly small risk of relapse to begin with, especially being this far out. Even if I wasn't in this low risk category, the Finnish trail results, would make me thirst after it. I used to be a cardiac Intensive Care Nurse at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and worked almost solely with people with failing hearts, getting transplants. It freaks me out until this day, yes I am a player afraid of the collateral heart damage as I toil with Herceptin so cautiously, knowing when I do receive it, I will be getting my cardiac enzymes evaluated which are predictors before echocardiogram of LVEF failure and heart damage and I will get Herceptin for the abbreviated 9 week schedule.

I've been listening to the subspace chatter. I've heard that the biggest gains from Herceptin come in the first few infusions.This is especially true when other issue besides binding of that her2 molecule are occuring are occurring early on and very quickly with activation of pTEN, causing a halt to the cascading events of cellular angiogenesis and tumor spread. Of course, you got to have pTEN present for this early on killing kick. Guess what, I just found out I have pTEN, lucky dog huh? No, what I consider lucky is not having breast cancer at all. This whole Herceptin guessing game deal makes me feel like a lab rat. Well, I guess we all are, in this her2 war. Anyway, I bet there will be a lot more clinical trails testing timing, including short 9 week trails, and 2 years and longer trails. In about 5 years, the timing issue will be revealed but my money is on the shorter run of Heceptin.