Topic: Prognosis?

A lady in my neighborhood was diagnosed stage 3 ILC  about five and half years ago.  She is NED for all these years.  She is working full time and walking 2 miles everyday.  Wish you will do well.

dcj,

Welcome...sorry you had to be here.  Stage III is scary business...I remember coming here in a panic after my surgeon called me with my diagnosis.  Everybody calmed me down and told me to hang on for the ride, but everything would be ok.  Do we know for sure?  No, of course not...but my life has returned to a somewhat normal life and I am planning my future.

Have you started a treatment plan yet?  Come here often to vent.  We get it and will hold your hand through it.

Take care,

Bugs

DCJ,

Statistics are just that.  I was really scared for a time too, then I realized that all I could do was get all the treatments and take every med my doctors gave me.  I had the "kitchen sink" thrown at me, just like everyone else here, and I'm happy to be living every day to its fullest.  My biggest advice is to surround yourself with positive, loving people, and ignore the stupid stuff people are bound to say to you.  You are going to do great!

Bobbie

i too was very very scared and terrified, i went from being stage 1 to 3a, it has been 1.5 years and day by day i feel better, i have met many ladies with many lymph nodes involved who had it years ago and are doing great, one lady had 10 nodes involved 20 years ago and she is doing great. as everyone has already said follow the doctors tx, if you are into alternative tx when you are done with chemo, you can see a holistic breast cancer specialist who will help build your immune system to the strongest level as well as accupunture, yoga, good diet, exercise these all helped me very much.

Hi there:

  I was diagnosed stage 3a over 4 years ago now and I am still cancer-free.

Hang in there.

Wendy A

Although hard to do, don't look for a prognosis. It depends on so many things.  I was dx a stage IIIc 3 years ago. I made myself sick with worry about my prognosis. It was 'serious'. 

What I have learned that any cancer dx is scary and serious. Some women get an excellent prognosis, only to present with Mets. It is a crap shoot.

Focus on surival and treatment. No one can predict what the outcome will be. As far as we are concern, there is no reason why we all won'g live a long life.

Janis

The stages are scary to read about at first. Likewise the pathology terms. I was diagnosed IIA at first and then changed to IIIA a couple of months after my mastectomy, after closer examination and removal of more lymph nodes. From what I understand, the main purpose of staging is to help the doctors determine the treatment plan, but the extra effect is that it scares us. I think at the outset it is helpful to know what we’re up against, i.e. how aggressive it is, and it gets less scary after a while as we get more familiar with all this stuff. (The education we didn’t sign up for.) Reading the posts here helps a lot. Best,

I know to hear "Stage III" is scary but lots of women have long healthy happy lives after a Stage III diagnosis.

There is a lot more to throw at BC than there once was. If you are ER/PR+ there is Tamoxifen and the AI's. If you are HER2+ there is Herceptin and Tykerb. If you are triple negative - triple negs are the ones who get most benefit from chemo, and the taxanes are really improving outcomes for ladies who get chemo.

I myself used conventional (chemo, rads, Tamoxifen) and alternative (acupuncture, vitamins, spiritual healing) methods. I know it's hard when you are first diagnosed and are sitting there gobsmacked and scared to death, but keep a positive attitude and know that the odds ARE on your side.