This Herceptin treatment

This Herceptin treatment article has been written by my wife Marjory. Herself a nurse – she was diagnosed with breast cancer in April 2006. At the time of diagnosis she decided to blog about her breast cancer treatment experiences and her site now attracts many thousands of visitors each month. She wrote this to reassure anyone about to embark on the gruelling assault course that constitutes treatment with herceptin. Here’s how it went:

Herceptin Treatment is a fairly new treatment for breast cancer. It was originally licensed for women who had some form of breast cancer metastatic spread but a little over two years ago it was licensed to be used on women with early stage breast cancer. For me this was amazing timing as I had just had a mastectomy and it was discovered that the tumour I had was HER-2 positive. This is the only type of tumour suitable for herceptin treatment.

So, it was organised that after chemotherapy and radiotherapy I would have seventeen Herceptin treatments at three weekly intervals. To be honest after all the other treatments I was tired and weary. However, I was aware of how important this treatment was and decided to give it my all! And hey ... that’s pretty much what it required as things turned out!

Herceptin works by interfering in the way which breast cancer cells divide and grow. Some breast cancer cells divide and grow when a protein that naturally occurs in the body attaches itself to another protein known as HER2, and guess where HER2 isfound – that’s right, it’s on the surface of the breast cancer cells.
Herceptin blocks this bonding process by attaching itself to the HER2 protein so that the growth factor cannot reach the breast cancer cells. This stops the cancer cells from dividing and growing.

Herceptin only works in people who have high levels of the HER2 protein. It appears to have little effect in those who do not. Approximately one in five breast cancer patients are HER-2 positive.

The reasoning behind giving Herceptin over seventeen treatments is that the timescale from diagnosis to the end of Herceptin is approximately eighteen months and eighteen months is the most likely time for recurrence, or metastatic spread of the breast cancer to occur – clever don’t you think!

During my treatments – which I got at home- I felt tired but not the dreaded near death tiredness that chemotherapy had delivered, and the herceptin tiredness only lasted a few days.
That said there was a build up effect and nearing the end of it I did feel pretty ropey a lot of the time.

My biggest problem with Herceptin was cannulation of my arm veins. Having had Epirubicin as one of my chemotherapy drugs my veins in my left hand and arm were hard and near impossible to cannulate.

The nurses could only use my left arm as my lymph nodes had been removed on the other side during the mastectomy and no cannulation or injections were allowed on the right to try to prevent infection and lymphedema. The poor nurses! Me a quivering wreck and no veins to be seen. It did cause me a lot of stress but to their great credit they managed it every time.

I was quite lucky not to have experienced too many side effects during my treatment. I did experience diarrhoea but while unpleasant, it’s manageable. Forward planning about the location of toilets and Imodium in your handbag works wonders!
Flu like symptoms are also common following administration of herceptin.

One of the more serious herceptin side effects is a reduction in heart function. To monitor this it is normal to have an injection fraction scan every three months to determine if any damage has been done. These scans terrified me at first as I didn’t want anything to interrupting my treatments. As it turned out I needn’t have worried as my heart function actually improved on Herceptin! Trust me to be different.

People can also experience allergic reactions and this is the reason the first two treatments are usually given in hospital.

My message to anybody out there who is embarking on Herceptin treatment is it’s not as bad as chemo, it truly is life saving and it will be over before you know it!