My heart goes out to you after reading your message.
Your timeline and cancer type has similarities with mine.
It is entirely normal to feel scared, might be worth speaking / emailing one of the nurses on Breast Cancer Now or MacMillan websites? Or are you near enough to a Maggie’s drop in centre? In my experience, access to traditional counselling services is slow.
To answer your specific question about whether 17 weeks from surgery to chemotherapy is normal, the answer is no! It seems to be a bit of a lottery which NHS Trust you’re in and some are under serious strain to provide oncology services within the NICE guidelines. Obviously it depends on your individual cancer but the absolute recommendation seems to be a maximum of 12 weeks but aiming for 30-60 days to start chemotherapy after surgery so that your risk of recurrence is minimised.
Do you have private health insurance with your / your spouse’s job? It turned out that I did and so was able to speed up my access to chemotherapy rather than wait an unacceptably long time for NHS chemotherapy. It feels so wrong when you’re told unflinchingly by your nurses/doctors that your wait for life saving treatment will be so long because of the backlog of cases.
Unfortunately you have to push back/advocate for yourself in today’s NHS and I would urge you not to just accept this and wait but to push for an early appointment with the oncologist. If you come up against the NHS brick wall response, you can contact PALS at your local hospital to help you with this.
I know it’s hard to fight the system when you’re so vulnerable but I have read a few posts on here where women have had long waits and have then had a recurrence so it’s worth it. I wish you the very best of luck xx
My adjuvant chemo started 18 weeks after WLE & SLNB for a stage 1, grade 3 triple negative tumour, the results of which were clear margins and nodes.
My cancer was confirmed to have recurred locally under the WLE scar a few days after my first round of chemo and I’m now undergoing a neo-adjuvant regime to shrink the cancer before more surgery, then more treatment.
Please know I’m not saying this will happen to you and I’m also not saying that starting my chemo earlier would have prevented my recurrence, but I have had it confirmed that the delay was significant so to quite simply answer your question based on this and echo @jock’s response 17 weeks is not normal. If I knew then what I know now, I’d have been hounding them every single day!
Next cycle will be worse. I know because everyone is saying.
I feel sad alot but trying to be positive. My daughter and grandson have recently moved away. The pain of not seeing them is probably worse than chemotherapy.
Hoping my headache eventually subsides before my next course.
Just hopping on to point you to the monthly chemo threads where you’re likely to get more relevant replies.
The link for July starters is below but you can participate in any month. It’s quite useful to visit the previous months to gain support from others’ previous experience and you can always offer it yourself to those upcoming if you felt like you wanted to. Just type a month in the search bar and you’ll be able to find the other threads.
