Drugs in Breast Cancer

Drugs in Breast Cancer

Drugs are your friends. Let me repeat, drugs, pharmaceuticals of all kinds for all things, are
your friends. Pill-popping, vein-coursing drugs are your friends. I’m not talking mother’s
little helper pills from the 1950s, nor do I want to come across as a caricature from Valley
of the Dolls. I never experimented with drugs in college. I drink organic milk, cook meals
from scratch virtually every day, don’t smoke, barely drink, and have few processed foods
in my house. But I am down with the drugs that have helped me since this ordeal began.

I’m talking about the benefits of the advancement of science, ladies.

In the category of silver linings, the fact that you are a breast cancer patient in the
twenty-first century counts as one. Trust me. BC (before cancer) I always considered
myself healthy. An annual visit to the doctor and ibuprofen for the unyielding onset of
middle age, but that was pretty much it for me. Apart from the occasional bacterial stomach
ulcer, I’ve been fortunate not to need a vast array of drugs for anything. Then came my
diagnosis, and my dresser became a veritable drugstore.

Here’s a peek into my medicine cabinet during the first year of my breast cancer
treatment:

Cyclophosphamide, docetaxel, dexamethasone sodium phosphate, famotidine,
diphenhydramine, ondansetron hydrochloride, Neulasta, Emend, prochlorperazine MAL,
alprazolam, zolpidem, citalopram, diazepam, tamoxifen, hydrocodone, cefadroxil,
clonazepam.

There are probably others, but you get the idea.

Lest you be concerned, I’m down to just a couple now. But this list and then some were
my companions during the worst part of my treatment.

Many of us think of breast cancer as a modern disease, but it has been with us since
recorded history began. Ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans all diagnosed and
tried to treat breast cancer. Unlike many other cancers, breast cancer was a disease that
had an identifiable manifestation—lumps that were palpable, visible, that sometimes even
broke through the skin. It is no surprise that from the earliest days cutting was the pretty
standard way to treat breast cancer, from removal of the breast with a knife to the more
professional early-twentieth-century radical mastectomy with anesthetics. This was, for the
most part, a solution to what was considered a local disease, not a disease caused by
cellular disruption that required holistic treatment.

I speak as someone who has undergone a mastectomy, so why the faith in drugs?
Because mastectomy alone isn’t always enough. In the absence of a cure, survival rates are
what we must cling to, and clearly chemotherapy, that toxic cocktail of poison that is
pumped through our bodies, must count as one of the blessings of late-twentieth-century
medicine.

As much as I hated going through it, I tried to imagine chemotherapy as a nail-biting
race. The mastectomy had cleared away the lead vehicles, the tumors, which had lodged
themselves in my breast ducts, but there was a real possibility that some cells might be
running around my body trying to build new tumors. They may have gotten a head start,
but now my team had the engines revved up, and as soon as the chemotherapy left the
starter gate, a mad pursuit was under way, chasing those microscopic cancer cells and
eliminating them before they could make their way fully around the course. Boom!

Thwack! Bam! All routes—ovaries, uterus, lungs, bones—No Entry! My hope is that one
day we will look back on chemotherapy the way we now look back at bloodletting and
leeches: They poisoned your whole body just to kill some errant cells? But in the
meantime, I, for one, am grateful for it.

Chemotherapy is but one of your pharmaceutical friends. There are many other drugs
you become acquainted with during this process. Anesthetics, of course (imagine having
your breast chopped off with nothing but a swig of alcohol and a bit between your teeth to
stem the pain), and everything else that they give you to go with the chemo, drugs for
stemming side effects and preventing nausea; drugs for anxiety and sleeping; drugs for
trying to keep the cancer at bay after the mastectomy and the chemotherapy.

Now some of these drugs will make you feel awful, some will make you feel better, and
others will help take the edge off. You have to work with your doctor to get it just right for
you. But you have to be stoic about so many other things, you don’t need to get all holier
than thou about the drugs. Who knew?