It's Monday.  Chemo starts Wednesday.  Wednesday feels like a line dividing my before life from my after life.  It is most certainly the line dividing sickness from health.  But its more than that.

My biggest fear in all of this (other than abandoning my family) is loosing my brain.   Countless people have told me about chemo brain.  They can't remember things.  They feel stupid.  They can't concentrate.  It scares me.  I don't mind being a little forgetful.  I mean, at this age who isn't?  But my brain is important to me.   I've always been more about the brain than the breasts.  I want to survive this, yes, but it would be nice if I survived this with my sense of humor and thinking skills intact.  Too much to ask?

Hopefully not.

Wednesday. 

That is the day I start to find out.

I have meals planned.  I have stocked up on bland snack foods.  I have washed the sheets and the house is clean.  I am like an expectant mother waiting for labor to start.  Waiting.  And wondering if I will be able to handle the birth.

Or the baby.

Wednesday,  it will all begin.  Four doses of adriamyacin and cytoxan two weeks apart followed by twelve weekly doses of taxol and herceptin.  The herceptin will continue for a year.  There will be a couple of weeks off after the taxol, then radiation begins - somewhere between thirty and forty five days of it.  

Maybe, as my sister in law says, it will be like pregnancy - over before I know it.  Right now, it seems like a long road.  Like pregnancy.  

And in the end, life will be different.  What kind of different remains to be seen.

I remind myself that I am an excellent healer.  My body will recognize the infusions for what they are: weapons.  Really powerful weapons.  I know my tumors ( both of them) were thickly surrounded by lymphatic tissue.  My body was determined to destroy the offending cells long before I discovered them.  My body wants this to be gone.  It will respond.  It will fight.

When the treatment is over, I will be cancer free.  Hopefully for a very long time.

And with a little luck, I'll still be funny.