My Story: Treatment Journey
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT | Amelia O’ Relly: “The way that this journey of treatment worked for me was I started with the kind of prescribed chemotherapy that was, you know, super aggressive so that we could contain it and and get to complete response right away. And we achieved that for awhile. For the first five or six months that I was on that first treatment, it worked. But then the minute I concluded that treatment and I moved to what would have been the predictable kind of next step of of the maintenance treatment, if you will. The cancer immediately came back.
And so now began, what would last almost a full year. There were seven different types of chemotherapy regimens that I went through, none of which were working or containing the illness.
So it was getting worse. And so…it was…that's when towards the end of 2020, I had to step away from what I was doing. Because…not only was the disease advancing so fast, it was also the amount of physical pain that I was in that I could no longer — it was not fair to the responsibilities that I had as an executive of an organization as well as to myself.
And so that's when I went on the treatment that I've been on since that time, which is the HER2 treatment, it is the only treatment that has been able to contain this and to give me complete response and to also allow me to to have my life back. And to be able to have a quality of life that I didn't have before and to be able to, you know, start my own my own organization. I was at a point at the beginning of December of 2020, that if we had not found this regimen, this treatment…and if they had not worked — then that was really…that was it for me.
And so that is another element of what I've been through that is even more surreal on top of the diagnosis was the fact that it took such a sharp turn for the worse.
And it stayed getting worse.
It had progressed beyond, you know, beyond the the initial, you know, liver and rib had progressive the skin. And so the pain once that happens and what a patient goes through is almost intolerable. And then along along came this treatment and and that really gave me my life back.”
