Breast Cancer Follow up & I.V. Antibiotics

It took a few weeks but my body finally recovered from the lumpectomy. There was scar tissue in my armpit where the incision was made, but my body healed there. So at least in all of this illness my body can still heal itself. That was a small ray of light. I saw the geneticist and again, I am lucky in that I do not have a gene mutation and the cancer I had rated low. I do however have estrogen positive cancer, so have been advised to go off of my estrogen cream. I haven't done that yet, because I am using such a miniscule amount, and because I was feeling so sick across the board. I know that the estrogen and progesterone creams have helped my mood and general state of well being. I was also advised to start taking Tamoxifen. There have been so many decisions to make health wise in the past few years with the lyme that this cancer diagnosis still feels surreal.  My body is telling me that it was a bump in the road and there isn't going to be any more cancer so I can move on.  Maybe stupid and naive, but intuitively I feel that it was a fluke because of the condition of my body. I have to make a decision about the Tamoxifen soon, but I am exhausted by these decisions.

In the meantime, I have been on three rounds of i.v. rocephin for the lyme. We were trying to do it only on the days I was flaring, but each time I went off of it I got very sick. So, now it's i.v. rocephin every day, probably for the next two months. I am feeling really good. Symptoms that have gone away are; pounding stomach, brain fog, itchy eyes, muscle aches, nerve pain in my jaw and head, swollen glands, racing thoughts, anxiety and that deep, soul sucking fatigue. Unfortunately, I think lyme heals in layers and now that those symptoms have disappeared new ones have shown up. Most significantly my knee and elbow joints are killing me. I never had joint pain in all of this time, which many lyme patients do. Perhaps the bacteria were always lurking there, but compared to all of the other horrific symptoms that was the least of my problems. Now that the body has been freed up of those others pains, the bacteria are wreaking havoc in the joints.  And after only three weeks on the rocephin I am once again dealing with yeast, despite taking high doses of pro-biotics and anti-fungals. It feels like it never ends.  But right now I am hopeful, more hopeful than I have been in a long time.

I.V. Antibiotics, Cancer

I do my first round of i.v. rocephin. I wait until I am in a flare, the theory being that the lyme cycles in a four week cycle and that is when I'm getting sick. My left eye always gets sticky and itchy and that's how I know a flare is coming. So when it happens I go to the doctor the next day and have a photo oxidation session first, then the i.v. antibiotics. I do that for 6 days in a row. I don't get sick. We might be onto something. I don't herx either. I'm thinking I don't herx because of the photo oxidation. I have a ton of energy too, also from the photo ox. Waiting to see what happens during the next flare. We are going to double the amount of antibiotics and see what happens. But I am all in because it intuitively makes sense to me. Why would I douse my body in antibiotics when I am asymptomatic? Pulsing seems to be the right fit for me.

A few days after treatment I have a day that throws me back to how I felt in the beginning, with incapacitating depression. Depression is depressing. I am so depressed in my body that I can't function. I do everything I know of to help myself...B12 shots, do yoga, eat healthy, drink green tea and watch a funny video. But it is so heavy it crushes me. I cry all day. This is the element of this illness that is hard for those who never had it to understand. The bacteria is in the BRAIN. It messes with your emotional center. So while there are debilitating physical symptoms, some days there are emotional ones; anxiety, irritability, soul crushing depression. I think I have this bad day because of the strong treatment I just did and it is essentially a herx.

 On another note entirely... I still can't believe that I'm typing the word cancer. It is completely surreal to me. I stand by my conviction that I got a tumor in my breast because my body couldn't fight off the cancer in it's current depleted state. With severe adrenal fatigue and constant inflammation from the tick borne disease my body didn't stand a chance. I think the photo oxidation is not only helping with the bacteria, viruses and candida, but also from a cancer perspective by boosting my immune system. What a mess. In terms of cancer news I did get good news. I do not have a genetic mutation and my tumor level is a 1. So it's not aggressive. It IS estrogen receptor positive. So now there is a discussion of me going off of my estrogen cream and going on tamoxifen (a drug that blocks estrogen). This makes me really frustrated because I finally got my hormones and moods relatively stable with the estrogen and progesterone cream. It's all pretty stressful. See above paragraph on depression.