I was diagnosed with Stage 2 Triple Positive Breast Cancer on September 9, 2024. In the first phase of my active treatment, I am undergoing neoadjuvant chemotherapy and then will progress to surgery and subsequent future treatment phases.
For those new to breast cancer (or anyone like me five months ago) there are many different types with incredibly different treatment plans. I’m in the small percentage of people whose cancer is “triple positive.”
Besides it sounding like the recovering overachiever that I am, what this actually means is that my cancer is both “hormone receptor positive” or HR+ (meaning the cancer has estrogen (ER+) and progesterone (PR+) receptors that use these hormones to grow) as well as “HER2 positive” (meaning the cancer has high levels of a protein called human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 which can cause it to grow & spread more aggressively). The good news is that this type of cancer often responds well to therapies that specifically target both the 2 hormones and the HER2 protein.
Part of the challenge I found as I was seeking information va early in my diagnosis was that there weren’t a lot of people sharing about Triple Positive Breast Cancer and TCHP chemotherapy (docetaxel or “Taxotere”; carboplatin; trastuzumab or “Herceptin”; pertuzumab “Perjeta”). And because each kind of breast cancer is so different, one person’s experience can be wildly different from another’s. So I’ll be diving into the good, the bad, and the ugly of my experience specific to Triple Positive and the TCHP protocol.
