My Friend Vicki

I visited with my friend, Vicki Thompson, at Banner Gateway, December 16th.  Vicki has stage 4 breast cancer and is not doing well.  I've known for some time that her cancer had metathesized to her liver and that her time would be short.  This has been a difficult time for me because the last time I saw Vicki was after her oncology visit in June, which happened to be the same time I had blood work done for my upcoming appointment.  So, needless to say I haven't seen Vicki in 6 months.

We had a nice visit.  Her spirits were high and she, of course, was thinking of others instead of herself. She asked me to bring her a Scentsy catalog so she could place an order. This made me feel uncomfortable because I knew that she would not be with us much longer.  I knew that if I place the order, she would not be here when it arrived and this bothered me tremendously being a breast cancer patient myself.

I'm so glad I took this opportunity to see and visit with her, as this was the last time I saw Vicki before she passed away on December 26, 2010. Her funeral service was this evening at Wyman's Funeral Home in Mesa.  It was a nice service with a lot of friends and family.  She will truly be missed.

Cancer Check Up

Just had my 6 month check up with Dr Bachrach.  I have been a little stressed due to my 5th anniversary of my diagnosis approaching and in addition, I have a friend, Vicki Thompson, that has breast cancer too.  I talked to Dr Bachrach about Vicki.

I met Vicki at a boutique I did in the Spring of 2009.  Her story is a different than mine in some ways.  The similarities are: we both are triple negative...which means, that we are Her2 neu negative and ER/PR negative.  For those of you that are not familiar with the terms, this means that the protein around the cells are negative that cause the cells to grow faster and our cancer does not need hormones to grow.  In other words, our cancer is VERY AGGRESSIVE and doesn't need anything to help it to grow, it just grows on its own.  It also has a higher recurrence rate! Yet, our cancer usually responds very well with chemo therapy.  However, in my friend, Vicki's case, her cancer has metastasized  and at this time it does not look good. I did visit with Vicki last week and I knew she was not doing well.  So as you can imagine this has brought the reality of breast cancer in the forefront of my mind again!

I shared Vicki's story with Dr Bachrach so he would understand more of my concerns.  He listened and did I feel better....NO!  But it was good to share and get it out.  Dr Bachrach proceeded to go over my labs and all my numbers look good and there are no signs of cancer!  Each month that goes by is another month closer to being "Cancer Free"!