I’m currently on a bit of a ‘chemo holiday” to see if that helps with my various pain symptoms and the neuropathy.  I got numb fingers two weeks ago, which led to me calling off the Eribulin last week and the oncologist’s suggestion of a “holiday” to give my body some off time and see if the chemo is contributing to or causing the various pains I have (mostly back and knee).  So this is my usual week off, but i skipped my second dose of chemo from cycle 30 last week.  II have CT scans next week, and then the week after we meet with the oncologist again to see what to do.  (That’s a l-o-n-g scan interv-hell!)  

If the cancer hasn’t grown then probably a cycle’s worth of holiday (3 weeks) before beginning another chemo—one that doesn’t have a big risk of neuropathy.  If it has grown then no more holiday, I’ll start on something.  Maybe Xeloda, which is suspected to maybe get into the brain (good for me).  We decided not to dig into that decision until we need to.  The chemo drugs known to work best for triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) also have a high risk of neuropathy, so for now they are not options.  Newer drugs (that may actually work just as well for me) have less risk.

The next step should be entering a clinical trial of a PARP inhibitor, very likely to work well on me because I have TNBC, but I need to be off steroids to be eligible.  And I am far from being off steroids, unfortunately.  But tapering down slowly–I have made it from 50 to 27 mg of Prednisone since the beginning of September.  Headaches continue, but not any worse.  And I have a new medicine to try that is aimed at headache reduction, starting tonight.

We’ll see what happens with my “lung spots”—I am hoping they are just sitting there still being mysterious and tiny.