Caroline's Breast Cancer Blog

     All month, I've been trying to find time to write my next blog about how I've been doing, overall.  It was supposed to be my 3rd annual State of the Lunion Address.  Unfortunately, a few things have recently happened that have overridden that plan.      Many of you know my mom.  She's 87 years old and nearly 20 years ago, following the unexpected death of my father, she moved to Illinois to be closer to us.  She bought a townhouse 5 blocks away from our house and when our children were young , she was incredib l e in helping Wynn and me care for them.  Through her 85th year, she was fiercely independent, strong and healthy.  Then in 2014, she had a stroke, and many things changed for her...and for me.  We found a wonderful caregiver, who stays with her Monday through Friday.  On the weekends, my mom would come and stay at our house , where we felt comfortable leaving her alone for a few hours at a t...

     Since being on Xalkori, I have been fortunate to have had few cancer-related problems.  Most days I enjoy good-to-excellent health.  This past November and December were rough, however.  After returning from a trip to Japan in mid-October, I had trouble recovering from the usual jet-lag.  The jet-lag turned to exhaustion, which led to fatigue, of the undescribeable variety. I also  experienced bone achiness and weeks of headaches.  (Headaches, for those of us with metastatic lung cancer on Xalkori, are particularly bothersome.  Despite this targeted chemotherapy's ability to control cancer growth from the neck -> down, Xalkori doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier, leaving our brains vulnerable to metastatic disease.)  To complicate things, I'm a person who gets headaches;  I've had them since childhood.  So in November and December, I couldn't assess if my headaches were part of my overall fatigue, or if my c...