|
Hi Aquinis,
Sorry I didn't post this sooner. I had recurrence with multiple mets to my liver in 2001. I was on Herceptin and Taxotere for about 8 months. At that point I was starting to have too many side effects from the Taxotere and after getting a second opinion at UCSF, it was recommended that I go off the chemo and just do Herceptin for awhile. The doc also said I should start taking Femara too. I was very concerned about doing this as my tumor markers were not yet in the normal range, but I didn't really have a choice. My markers did continue to fall and reach normal on just Herceptin. I ended up having liver resection at the end of that year because the one last spot on my liver would not go away and I wanted to be sure we got it all. Turns out there was no cancer there, just necrotic tissue.
My markers shot up again in 2003, and even though we couldn't find anything on scans we decided to add Xeloda to the Herceptin(which I had been getting every 3 weeks) and see if my markers would come down. Well, I couldn't handle the Xeloda and ended up in the hospital for about a week. The good thing is that my markers did go down and I have been NED in my body ever since. I did have a brain lesion pop up this past July, but we caught it early and successfully treated it with Gamm Knife at UCSF.
I hope this helps and answers your questions. And again, didn't mean to take so long to post this. Kim in CA
|