Dad in Town and other fun updates

Hi Team,

Dad got into town yesterday! He will be here for a week and a half or so, for both Father's Day and his birthday. I'm glad he is finally able to take a breath and relax for a few days. The fundraiser was a huge success, thanks to all of you. There really is no way to thank everyone for all your hard work, donations, love and aloha. But I really do feel all the love from everyone. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Here are the only photos I've gotten so far, one with all our friends eating lunch, and the other of mom and Sam Choy, our chef extraordinaire.

The weekend was good, I also had my friend Jean and her boyfriend Michael in town from Florida. We went to a baseball game and had a few delicious home-made dinners!

I've been having a really good week, as I had hoped since I'm in my last week of the cycle - chemo again on Monday. I still get really tired when walking around all day, but I have enough energy to do more than just one little thing each day. So at this point I think I am supposed to celebrate because I am officially halfway done with chemo. And I am happy with that but to be really honest, I can't believe I'm only halfway there. It seems like quite the long journey - I know, glass half full vs half empty but the glass can be half full of something you really don't want to drink, right? Anyway, maybe a little to far with that analogy.

I met with a genetics counselor on Monday, which was fairly interesting. She told me that the average woman under the age of 40 has only a 0.5% chance of getting 'circumstantial' breast cancer (vs. hereditary) whereas an under-40 woman has a 10-20% of getting breast cancer if you have an inherited breast cancer genetic mutation. I am getting the blood test done to see if I have that gene, but based on my family history (or lack thereof for breast/ovarian cancer) the likelihood is that it will come back negative. That said, she impressed upon me that there are only 2 genes mapped to breast cancer out of the 20's of thousands of genes that we have in our body as well as a limited amount of mutations mapped that they attribute to the development of breast cancer. So, to sum it up, even if my test comes back negative, statistically I should still treat this as a hereditary type of breast cancer in terms of how I screen myself and the precautions I take. I will also be participating in studies such as this one to help identify future genes and/or mutations we can find to help know more about where breast cancer originates from in the body.

Tomorrow I'll have my next consult with my oncologist and give them a bunch of blood to test my white blood cells, red blood cells, platelets, etc before my next chemo. Will keep you all posted.

Love,
Amy