lumpectomy vs mastectomy - why did you choose your route?
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Hello Everyone,
We are in desperate need for your help in making a decision. My mom was diagnosed with DCIS (stage 0 cancer - noninvasive) in her left breast so the treatment was to do lumpectomy and get radiations. She is also a heart patient. We went with it and by grace of God, the procedure went smoothly and she had a speedy recovery within two weeks. The chunk they took out was about 6 cm and the pathology report showed 4 inadequate margins. Radiation can't be done because the margins are positive. Thankfully, this 6cm lump was all DCIS and non-invasive.
The doctor has recommend mastectomy for my mom because of extent of DCIS seen but she can't guarantee how much is in there? She will be doing biopsy in her lymp nodes to make sure they are cancer free and the pathologist will be present to assure that. We heard mastectomy is a painful procedure and more damaging.
The doctor don't know how widespread it is (the surgeon have taken out what was shown in the mammogram and ultrasound ) so she can re-exercise that 4 involved margins of the lumpectomy site that turned out to be positive. For radiation, we need negative margins.
We are scared to take extensive decision since my mom won't be feeling her sensitive nerves and etc but we are confused and decided to go with the doctor. What if we start regretting after the results that there was just little bit left that could have been tackle with lumpectomy. If there is a lot more of DCIS then we'd be satisfied with our decision. Have any of you been in this situation?
The questions that concerned us, what if there is little bit more DCIS left on the other hand which can be taken out with lumpectomy. This is all dependent on chance. The growth rate of my mom DCIS is slow but we don't know what if it becomes fast?
Please help us out what to do as it is non-invasive cancer and we don't want it to become invasive. It's a very tough decision.0 -
Hello everyone, I'm new to the forum. I was given my diagnosis just Wed 10/14/2015 and my oncologist gave me the standard two choices. It really helps to read everyone's experiences and opinions. I am very torn between the two. At first, right there and then at the oncologist office I thought why wouldn't I go for the mastectomy, he told me it was 1% of recurrence vs. the lumpectomy + rad + tam of 10-15% mathematically it's a no brainier. Then only after I began reading more about both procedures I started having 2nd (3rd, 4th, etc) thoughts. OMG, this is so frustrating and confusing.
Beesie, your list is really helpful. Thank you for taking the time to draft this extensive list for us. I really appreciate you.
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Dear MKTCA, one big part of the decision is your breast density. My breasts were so dense that they could not see my 2.2 cm IDC so how could they see anything in a mammogram? I had a lumpectomy one year and the very next year had a double mastectomy. If you have radiation after a lumpectomy, you will have less chance of your reconstruction working. Wish someone had told me that.
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Hi MKTCA,
I don't think that the MO can give you accurate recurrence risk for lumpectomy, rads, Tamox, until they do the actual lumpectomy surgery to see the extent of disease and other parameters (necrosis, grade, etc.) I guess you have some of that information already, but if it's a large area and it has certain parameters in the pathology, the risk is going to be greater than if its a smaller area, etc. I found that the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center website's nomogram for DCIS was helpful for calculating risk. It takes into account most of the usual parameters--grade, palpable or not, necrosis, how many re-excisions required for clean margins, wide vs. narrow margins, age at diagnosis etc. Some have faulted their equation because it takes size into account only indirectly (based on number of re-excisions), and that may not be as accurate as size, per se, but it's actually not so easy to assess precise size when it's multifocal and spread throughout a region of the breast. You really can't do this nomogram until you have had the lumpectomy (or lumpectomies), but it does help to decide if you should take Tamoxifen or not, giving you recurrence risk with and without medication. The estimates of 10 to 15 percent that you were given, most likely include both recurrence risk for IDC and for DCIS, usually thought of as 50 percent risk for IDC and 50 percent risk for recurrence of DCIS.
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Aug242007:"f you have radiation after a lumpectomy, you will have less chance of your reconstruction working. Wish someone had told me that.". Wow, I did not know that at all. My tissues are also dense but to what calibur I have no clue. I will surely address this issue with my oncologist. Thanks for sharing.
ballet12: Yeah you are right, those percentages he gave me was for general stats not really to my personal condition. I really have to look further into this to help be make the right decision.
Thank you ladies for responding and helping. I went through my pathology report a dozen times and still It's a bit foreign to me as I am not a doctor even though I'm trying super hard to look up all the terminologies one by one. For example, on my report the Nuclear Grade is described as "intermediate" as oppose to a number that you ladies have. What is 'intermediate"?
I feel like I need to see my oncologist another time just to ask all these questions because I was just in a state of shock on my first appt. I'm going to make an appt with a plastic surgeon next and talk with her regarding breast reconstruction surgeriy. I'm going to be more prepare with written questions this time.
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Hi MKTCA, a nuclear grade of "intermediate" corresponds to grade 2 (of 1, 2,3 with 3 being the highest and 1 being the lowest).
Also, you can do a lumpectomy and see what you are actually dealing with. If mastectomy seems the way to go at that point, then do it. You can't go backwards to lumpectomy after mx, but you can always go forward to mastectomy after lumpectomy. People sometimes do that months later. If you aren't sure, and there is that issue of radiation effects prior to mastectomy, you can still do the lumpectomy prior to radiation and re-evaluate at that point.
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ballet12 Thank you for the clarification on my grade level.
As I read more and more about my options and their risks involved, I feel more indecisive. Initially I just want the route that will lead me to the least surgery/drug procedures but it's not that simple because outcomes will be different on every individual. At this point, I just want to make the decision that I won't regret. I thought if I had a mastectomy, it would be done with one surgery, the removal of the breast and the replacement of the implant. Didn't realized their are TE (Tissue Expanders) involved and another surgery has to be done to insert the actual implant. Then their are the different types of implants: saline, silicone and gummi bear (never even heard of those and don't even know if they still use them). Then to top it all off, implants may only last up to 10 years and they have to be replaced, so that means more surgeries to come in my future. In addition to that, there are certain types of bras that are suitable for women with implants. If I go the lumpectomy route, there is radiation therapy at a nearly daily basis for up to 6 weeks, and the tamoxifen for 5 yrs. Reading the side effects from Tamoxifen scares the hell out of me, especially the cancer causing ones. http://www.drugs.com/sfx/tamoxifen-side-effects.html. OK, if I dodge the bullet from getting breast cancer by taking tamoxifen, I may get uterus or liver cancer later. Man, this seems like a loose loose situation.
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Well first of all over the years treatments will improve. Second of all you only hsve a small DCIS size with no lymph involvement. Tamoxifen has pretty awful sides. Aromisin or the third generation AI sound better. See kbee, she had a beautiful reconstruction with pics - if things go that far. Some get nipple saving surgery. Don't they use your own fat sometimes for implants? It is all very confusing so you can't make a decision so soon. It took me months to get used to this all time bummer. In the meantime I'm on Femara and tumor has shrunk. DCIS area has shrunk, both by half. Hope this helps....
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Just a note about the Tamoxifen (and to the previous poster, not all women have the choice between Tamoxifen and an AI - if you are premenopausal you can’t take an AI without ovarian suppression, and since the AI’s have not officially been approved for DCIS, some doctors will not proscribe them - others will do it “off label”).
Tamoxifen has been used in women for many, many years - it is a well known and frequently used drug. While it has apparently caused liver cancer in rats, that is not considered to be a known side effect in women, and I wouldn’t give it another thought (it’s been in use long enough that if that was a real problem in women, we would know about it). Yes, it can “double” your rate of uterine cancer but the baseline risk is very, very low to begin with. So you go (don’t remember the exact numbers) from something like 1/100 to 2/100. Still very tiny risk. Also, uterine cancer when caught early is very treatable with surgery alone, so as long as you are being monitored closely, it really isn’t a huge risk. This does have to be balanced with your risk of invasive breast cancer though - if that is tiny (due to mastectomy or other factors) it may balance out. In my case, I felt the chances of invasive breast cancer (either a recurrence or new primary) were much larger than the risks of uterine cancer caused by Tamoxifen (which is even rarer when you are premenopausal, as I am).
As for the other side effects of Tamoxifen, most are “quality of life” ones that go away once you stop the drug. Many if not most people who take it don’t find them bad enough to want to quit. Personally, I actually feel better on it than I did during the peri-menopausally caused unbalanced hormones that were plaguing me before starting it. The reason I bring this up is that you need to remember that when you read about it on internet message boards, you are mostly hearing from people who are having problems with it. The rest of us don’t bother to post because we are doing well.
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Marijen and Annette47, thank you both for your thoughts. All your comments really help. I appreciate it very much. I will continue to do more research and ask tons of questions to both my onogologist and PS, hoping I can make a sound decision soon. BTW, how much time is too much time to make a decision like this? I feel like many just know what they want to do within a month's time while I'm just dragging me feet.
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The good thing about DCIS is that you have time to make decisions! Much different than if you have an aggressive invasive cancer that is rapidly spreading, so take the time to educate yourself about your options and think things through.
Just to give you an idea of my time frame - I had a suspicious mammogram in mid October, was supposed to have a biopsy on October 30th, but then Hurricane Sandy hit and the center was without power for 3 weeks, so I didn’t have that until right before Thanksgiving. I had the surgery about 3 weeks later as I teach at a University and wanted to wait until the semester was over. They said to wait about 6 weeks before starting radiation, so I started that in the end of January. That took 6 weeks, and then they said to wait a month before starting on the Tamoxifen - they felt it was better to separate the two things so that we could better attribute side effects to the correct treatment. At no point did I feel like there was any rush to get through things. I knew going in that I preferred lumpectomy to mastectomy (having just helped my mother through the same decision about a month before I was diagnosed - in her case she chose mastectomy). Had I not already been through the thought process I might have taken more time to think about it.
The first decision you will need to make is about the surgery, but if you are really undecided, keep in mind that you can always have a lumpectomy and then go back for a mastectomy but you can’t go the other direction! Once you get the complete pathology results from surgery (so you can find out the extent, margins and if you have any invasive components) you can start to think about radiation and anti-hormonal therapy.
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You're welcome MKTCA, Annette said it best. I read in the beginning that there is time and you won't know until you know, if that makes sense.
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Marjen, yes I know what you mean. And Annette, I see your pt. I never noticed until now the dates you ladies have between Dx, Surgery and different types of therapy. Now I realized there are some time lapse between these. Some longer than others but never the less there are some months between. Now I don't feel as pressured to make my decision at least.
I got my referral to see a plastic surgeon over this weekend and I called this morning to get an appt, her soonest opening is not until 11/25. I told the nurse if there's anyway I can see her sooner because my follow up oncologist appt is before that. They told me that she would talk to the head nurse to move things around and would get back to me. At this rate, I feel like my surgery won't happen until after the holidays. Is that a good or bad thing?
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That would be two months which gives you plenty of time to think it over.
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MKTCA,
Check to see if your local breast clinic or cancer center has a nurse navigator dealing with breast cancer. Your oncologist's office might have a name. A nurse navigator at one of the breast centers here was invaluable to me. She spent a great deal of time on the phone answering all of my questions. The conversation with her helped me formulate the questions I needed to ask my oncologist.
Good luck.
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Hi ladies, hope you all are well. I'm still deciding. At least I'm writing down tons of questions in preparation for both my PS appt next Tuesday (they moved it up) and my oncologist the following Wed. I was considering the lumpectomy thinking I should take advantage of being in the metropolitan area where I live and rad therapy is available but again the side effects scare me. Also, read that some women kept developing ovarian cyts when they are on tamoxifen and I got scared again. Let's face it, I'm just a big chicken.
Thank you Grandmatexas, I will ask for a nurse navigator. I have read somewhere that hospital has them to help guide patients. God knows I need all the help I can get. I'm not a decisive person to begin with and I feel sovery overwhelmed.
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MKCTA:
For my wife.. the decision between a lumpectomy vs a mastectomy came down to simple thought that I sort of tried to put in everyday terms to understand. Now to me this is just my thoughts about DCIS....
DCIS and the breast to me is like a chocolate chip cookie (hang in there with me)
..... DCIS to me is like the chocolate chips within the cookie. When it comes to radiation/lumpectomy how can I expect the doctor to be able to collect/ensure that all of the chocolate chip pieces have been removed? Some of those chips vary in size and not all of them maybe seen due to being small chips that are scattered through out the cookie (breast) and may not all be in the "cluster" that you see within the DCIS. The piece of mind that a mastectomy brings in removing the breast tissue that may or may not at that time exhibit DCIS outweighed an approach of going in and removing what can only been seen at this time. To us (to my wife) the piece of mind of a mastectomy to ensure the entire cookie was removed thus greater chances of all of the chocolate chips being removed and not just a removal of pinpointed areas during a lumpectomy. IT SHOULD BE NOTED THOUGH-- ALONG WITH THE DCIS SHE DID HAVE ONE LUMP IN HER BREAST (IDC) THAT WAS MORE THAN DCIS -- and only one breast had the DCIS and the IDC
My wife optioned to have a double mastectomy with reconstructive surgery (TE's) put in during the mastectomy. Her Breast Surgeon and her plastic surgeon worked together during the same surgery... and the process of expanders was not bad at all. Due to her going through chemo her PS said that there was no rush to fill her expanders so her fills each week were low amounts which allowed her to be very comfortable during the "stretching" phase of her reconstruction.
In regards to the implants.. saline vs silicone -- your plastic surgeon will walk you through all of this... as her Plastic Surgeon said to her "I am the fun doctor. I am the doctor who helps you get back to looking the way you want to after all of your treatments. We can go as slow as needed." This allowed for time to understand, ask lots of questions (we have different questions at each fill). we called it her F&A (fill and ask) time and this was weekly. The other good part about the fills.. as he said he had a recommended size in his mind.. however he said He would fill until the day that my wife wakes up, looks at herself in the mirror and says YEP this is the size I want to be. That's exactly how it ended up being... her reconstruction is scheduled for Dec 8th.
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Hi!
I feel like lumpectomy vs mastectomy is such a personal decision - meaning the reason we select which procedure we go with. There are 100 good reasons to do a lumpectomy and 100 good reasons to select a mastectomy! These are just my personal thoughts after having been thru 2 stereotactics, 2 lumpectomies, radiation and 2 reconstructions.......
For me, the lumpectomy recovery was pretty easy and I managed to make it thru radiation fairly easy as well. There are some horror stories about radiation but truly, I kept lotion on the breast, did not have blisters, it did turn dark but now all color is back to normal. On my work and personal time, it was a little inconvenient driving for radiation for 6 weeks and all the follow up appointments.....one of the things I like the least so far is taking arimidex............those have bad side effects.
I am not all that happy with my reconstruction results and I know it has nothing to do with the surgeon - I think sometimes it's just impossible to come out with the same sized breasts - some I think get lucky but my cancer breast was half the size of my healthy one and deformed from the surgery and radiation.
Part of me will always wonder if I should have gone the mastectomy route and done complete reconstruction for both breasts.
NOW THE AMAZING NEWS - just got results back yesterday in the mail - my first Tomosynthesis Mammogram done and it is CLEAN!
Hugs to all on this wonderful website battling cancer
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I got the dreaded call November 6, 2015, High-grade DCIS. Yesterday I met with a surgeon and he gave me the following information:
If he does a lumpectomy then he wants to do a MRI first to make sure there are no surprises. When I have the MRI and If the DCIS is in many spots in my breast I have to have a mastectomy.
If its only in one spot then I can do a lumpectomy with radiation and chemo.
I told him I want to be tested for the gene because if I have the gene then I want the mastectomy either way. But he says only 5% of the time women have the gene and still get breast cancer. So it sounds like a "false negative". I will still have the gene test but not an immediate step.
If I do lumpectomy radiation and chemo there's a slight chance it will come back. If I do mastectomy its gone assuming there's no lymph node involvement. If the cancer is truly DCIS then there won't be any lymph node involvement.
All comes down to if I can live with my decision with no regrets . Still not really sure which way I will go. Maybe the MRI will make the decision easy for me......Any thoughts out there?
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Maine1965, why would your doctor recommend chemo for DCIS? I had bilateral invasive cancer and still didn't need chemo!
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Pure DCIS is never given chemo. Are you thinking of anti-hormonals such as Tamoxifen? Those are very different from chemo. Even if only 5% of the population has the gene (meaning people without the gene still get cancer), of the people with the gene 55-60% of them will get cancer so the risk of recurrence and/or new primaries is significantly higher, as per the National Cancer Institute http://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/genetics/brca-fact-sheet.
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SummerAngel and Annette47, Yes I mean Tamoxifen or something similar.
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Amstar15 - thank you for sharing your experience. Best wishes to your wife's reconstruction.
Dogsneverlie - yay for being clean.
Maine1965 - yes do wait for MRI results to help you decide.
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I have gone back and forth about lumpectomy vs. mastectomy and I'm about 90% decided on mastectomy. I am meeting with a radiology oncologist tomorrow and hope to see a plastic surgeon sometime this week, so this may all change
I had a lump for 2 years that did not show up on mammogram or ultrasound (I do not have dense breasts). I was told initially that it may be scar tissue from a cyst that was aspirated in 2013. The most recent mammo in October showed an area that was slightly more dense than it was 3 years ago. The radiologist was not concerned and told me I could just come back in 6 months for a follow up. I had a biopsy instead and was diagnosed with ILC on 11/05. An MRI showed a second area of concern, and I'm waiting for the biopsy results for this second spot. My BS will be able to get both spots if I opt for a lumpectomy, which is a very attractive option - less recovery time, less pain, etc. However, this is really a numbers game - what is the risk that I am comfortable living with 5 or 10 or 20 years down the line? Outcome in terms of overall survival is exactly the same. Disease-free survival, however, is lower for lumpectomy: I have a 10% chance of re-occurence with a lumpectomy vs. 1-2% with mastectomy. They had such a difficult time finding the first cancer, so I don't have much confidence in their ability to detect a second occurrence. And what if there are other small tumors in my breast that have not been detected? ER+ cancers sometimes become resistant to endocrine therapy, raising the chance that a recurrent tumor, in my breast or elsewhere, may be more difficult to treat. I also have a strong family history of lung cancer. Whole breast radiation, required for lumpectomies, might be effective at eliminating residual cancer cells, but raises the chance for lung cancer, sometimes showing up 15-20 years later. If I beat breast cancer, do I really want to be dealing with lung cancer in my 70's? In addition, I am small breasted and the amount to be removed by lumpectomy would leave me pretty much disfigured. I'm not that concerned about it, but I do wonder how I will feel each day looking in the mirror and seeing a big dent in the side of my breast.
Finally, ILC has a greater chance of occurring in the good breast. I've thought about having a prophylactic mastectomy at the same time as the first one, but I think I'll wait a year and see how the first one turns out. I can then go direct to implant and match the good side to the cancery side (maybe add a cup size?).
I have to say that the one thing that has kept me sane in the past few weeks is reading messages on the discussion boards here! Many thanks to all who have posted their experiences - it is so helpful to find others who are going through this at the same time, and also to read messages from women who are survivors. This is a very scary time, and your messages bring me hope that I can do this.
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Hi Candi07, I read your thread from 2013 and wondered how you did after your lx?
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Hi. I am in a similar situation as well. This breast cancer stuff sucks. At 42 diagnosed with LCIS, age 44 Atypical Ductal Hyperplasia and age 53 DCIS high grade necrosis. The findings among calcifications, very small and margins were clean during lumpectomy. My mom's mother died of breast cancer at 42 years old. My mom had I believe had DCIS at 73 years old with 35 sessions of radiation. Yikes! They said I would need 16. My BRACA was negative. But we all know this is not a profound result when negative. It could be that they just didn't find that particular gene yet. I originally started at NYU - wonderful doctors and was going for a bilateral mastectomy with DIEP Flap construction. Then I got some pressure about getting a second opinion and then went to Memorial Sloan Kettering who said I didn't need a bilateral mastectomy. I had gone for the assimilation for radiation. I have not had radiation yet. Diagnosis was on 10/28 and lumpectomy on 12/17. But really wondering if I made the right choice. I went from age 44 to getting Atypical Ductal Hyperplasia to DCIS high grade in 9 years. I feel like I am on a faster cycle in maybe developing invasive cancer. Losing my breast does seems devastating as well. I am a 40 DDD (in good shape) and I was told the best the plastic surgeon can give me is a C with my own skin and that sounded hesitated. On the other hand, I would be a real lousy patient if I got cancer. Both choices seem to stink. LOL. I wish there was some test that could determine your next possible reoccurrence. But I am asking for miracles. Signed... "Sitting on the fence!"
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Thank you for sharing that pertinent point.
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You describe something I also experienced: The ever-changing diagnosis and the doc who says they told you what they didn't tell you. In my case, it was the ball rolling downhill from "it's probably a lymph node; let's watch it" to "It's DCIS, let's slash/burn/poison it." The first doc, the one who identified it as a "mass" in my breast, then ran away from his own diagnosis, and put all sorts of caveats in my chart about assurances he never gave me concerning how it most certainly was not likely to be cancer and how I insisted on a biopsy, yada, yada, yada.
Truth told, I have never believed in "watching" a suspicious mass in my breast. Watch it do what?
I spent a lot of time, reading about DCIS and its treatments on PubMed, the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet these past few weeks. One thing I noted is that there's a strong movement among academic docs (read that big-name cancer centers) to "educate" women away from choosing mastectomy. The idea is that giving you a dose of everything they've got, even if surgery would make it unnecessary, is "conservative" treatment.
The truth is, if you've got DCIS and it's real DCIS, you don't have to have the burn/poison part of the medical slash/burn/poison cocktail for cancer. You can have a mastectomy and skip the damage that radiation and hormone therapy do to your body. Or, you can skip the mastectomy and keep your breast with the full dose of partial mastectomy, radiation and hormone therapy. It's YOUR choice, and should be made according to YOUR values.
Do YOU value your breast enough to put yourself through radiation and hormone therapy? Are YOU willing to risk the side effects? On the other hand, does YOUR desire to avoid those potential side effects outweigh keeping YOUR breast?
It's a simple equation, and should be solved according to YOUR values, not your doc's.
DCIS is that rare cancer which really can be given, by surgery alone, something as close to a cure as cancer allows. The surgery in question is radical, but then, so are the other options. Cancer does not give easy choices.
One thing I learned from reading all those studies is that the docs don't really know. That's why they fall back on statistics instead of genuine conversation with their patients. They don't know if their noxious treatments will cure, kill or just make you miserable. They have no idea who is going to live with this disease and who is going to die. They bluster and bully, but they don't know, not any more than they "knew" that my innocent-looking little bump was in fact not so innocent.
There's another movement afoot to treat DCIS by "watchful waiting." By that I mean a medical plan to do nothing at all, to just watch and see if it turns really ugly or stays the same. The person who will pay for this little adventure in figuring things out if it does indeed turn ugly is the woman. The thought behind this movement is that the docs have surmised -- based on autopsies of women who died from other causes -- that about 19% of women have undiagnosed breast cancers when they die of these other causes. Of course, 19% of women are not diagnosed with breast cancer. Ergo, some of these women are able to kick the cancer to the curb through their own immune systems.
Soooo .... they've decided to just not treat a lucky few and engage in "watchful waiting" to see how it comes out. I'm assuming this is done with the full knowledge and consent of the women involved.
The hole in this thinking is that "other causes" is too vague by ten. Did they die of other diseases, or were they hit with big rocks or something? It makes a big difference, because it might be that their breast cancers were part of an overall decline in health and would have killed at least some of them except that the overall decline allowed something else to get to them first. For instance, how old were these women? Did they simply die of old age before the cancer could kill them? What I'm saying here is that the hypothesis itself may very well be flawed.
The studies I read were very thin to base such certainties on. These docs quote statistics as if they were speaking eternal verities. But in fact the studies are almost always done on such a small group of patients that they come close to being a coffee klatch. "Big" studies usually follow 1500 women or so. Others may just be a handful of women. That allows enormous room for individual variation. In fact, it guarantees it.
One of the things that I noted is that the almighty statistics vary wildly from one study to the next, and that's on something as easy to quantify as rates of recurrence. That's why one doc will quote one statistic and another doc will give you a different number. They're looking at different studies.
Sloan Kettering has put what amounts to a Monte Carlo simulation of DCIS recurrence risk on its web site, based on the variables and research it chooses. Mastectomy is left out of the simulation as a variable, which makes the simulation more of a manipulation than anything else, right from the get go.
I've had more than one doc point to this as if it was a rock-solid something or other, repeating "7% chance of recurrence!" as if I'd just won the lottery. They don't seem to be aware that I had a course or two in statistical analysis in college and that I've seen Monte Carlo simulations before. Monte Carlo simulations are on almost all brokerage company web sites, talking about stocks, bonds, cash, returns and how long your money will last. The major differences are that brokerage firms have a lot more data to work with, and the law requires them to be a bit more honest about what variables they use and what disclaimers they print. I certainly have not seen a brokerage firm make the outlandish claims about certainty that these docs imply.
Cancer is a tough boogie. Anything we do is a roll of the dice. The docs don't know as much as they pretend, and that's by powers of ten. They don't really even understand this disease they're trying to treat, and they've lost the art of medicine by going in so big for the statistics of medicine. I was treated as a disembodied cancer with a mouth, and they were doing their best to get me to shut that mouth.
I apologize for being so angry. I hope I don't make this more difficult for you, my sisters, as you go through this by talking this way. I certainly don't want to encourage anyone to not get treatment. Traditional medicine, as flawed as it is, is still the best -- read that, the only -- shot we've got. But this is YOUR life. It is YOUR body. And the consequences of the decisions you make are all yours, and yours alone.
You should decide, based on your values and an understanding of your illness and treatment options that is rooted in honest information that was provided without manipulation, what course of treatment you follow.
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Good Morning to you all. As I am sure with all of you, there is a sense of nervousness and fear as I write this post to share with you. On one hand some would say I am lucky that my journey with BC has moved so quickly, but that feeling of being slammed with a bat is still resonating within me ever so struck. In a mere 16 day period, I found a lump in my left breast, was examined by my GYN, referred for a mammo/unltrasound. It is noteworthy that I am 57, BRAC Negative and still high risk due to family history. The mammo not only confirmed the lump but identified some new calcification that was not present 8 months prior at my routine mammo. It is important to know that I also had a screening MRI just two months prior in Dec 2015. I could be the poster child for checks. In between the mammo and MRI I was receiving two checks by my GYN. There is not much more I could have done to get screened. So two days after mammo I have two separate biopsies. Fortunately the lump turned out to be benign but the calcification was tagged 4mm invasive DIC when presence of DCIS in milk ducts. I think there is one thing we can all agree on...there is nothing like that shocking feeling and the despair you feel when you are told you have cancer. Seven days later I submitted to a lumpectomy with removal of the sentinel lymph node plus one. Initial pathology cleared the lymph nodes so it was a waiting game for the final report. I was just told that of five margins, four were positive for cancer. If there was any upside, it is all DCIS...non invasive. So the question that becomes heavy is what do you do. It is never a simple question of how attached you are or are not to your breast. It isn't about immediate resolution that any decision you make is going to alter your life forever. For me, and we are all different, I want to dream of the day when I no longer have to fear someone telling me again that I have breast cancer. For my own personal situation (including risk) I have to take the most radical approach to achieve that. Risk factor is the most important thing to me now. Even in my clean breast, each year as I get older, the risk increase to get breast cancer. I will always have in the back of my mind that in my cancer breast that there is an approximate 30 percent change of re-occurrence. Am I upset, do I feel down, am I scared, do I understand all of your situations. Absolutely. I have to make the choice that I feel is right for me for long term survival. I will miss the old me and I am very sure that I have a long emotional journey ahead of me. But I am not alone. I have read testimony from some amazing women who are sitting in the same fear and dazed state I am. I am thinking of you all. I have an appointment on Friday with a plastic surgeon followed by one with breast surgeon as I have decided to have a double mastectomy. I am going to stand up and stare this fear in the eyes. I will take strength when thinking of all of you.
Stage 1/Grade 2 downgraded to Stage 0 non-invasive following lumpectomy. DCIS ER+/HER2+
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