worried it will spread before mastectomy op
had lumpectomy not clear so need mastectomy scheduled for 29/9/25 lymph nodes clear but worried it will spread before then. Surgeon says it won't but when diagnosed told it was 17mm and after lumpectomy told it was 32mm so doubled in 6 weeks
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Hi @mrsnosmits and welcome to our community. We're so very sorry for the reasons that bring you here, but we're really glad you've found us. You're sure to find our community a wonderful source of advice, information, encouragement, and support. We're all here for you!
We know it can be stressful waiting for more treatment. Keep in mind that it's very common for an estimated size of cancer to be completely different at time of diagnosis vs. what's removed in surgery — doctors can't truly tell the size of a cancer until it's been extracted, so it's likely it was closer to the 32mm size all along and didn't necessarily double in size.
In addition, you might find this information helpful from our site:
When you get your pathology results from your doctor, you’ll find out if cancer cells were found in the tissue surrounding the tumor. The rim of normal tissue surrounding the tumor is called the margin. If no cancer cells were found in the margins, then the margins are considered to be negative, clear, or clean. If cancer cells were found in the margins, then they are considered to be positive.
To get clean margins, your surgeon may recommend a second surgery, called re-excision lumpectomy. Some surgeons refer to re-excision as “clearing the margins.” About 20% of people who have lumpectomy require a re-excision lumpectomy because of positive margins.
If there are still positive margins after re-excision, your surgeon may need to do another re-excision or perform a mastectomy.
Also, we invite you to join our Virtual Support Groups to meet others going through treatment and get encouragement and support while you wait for your surgery.
Welcome again to the community and let us know if there's anything we can do to help!
—The Mods
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@mrsnosmits i don’t know if this is the case with your tumor or not, but I was told tumor size from my mammogram, then when I had the MRI was told a bigger size for the tumor. When I had my mastectomy the tumor was the size indicated in the MRI report. (It’s my understanding that the MRI provides better imagining than a mammogram. ) So maybe your tumor hasn’t grown - it just appeared smaller in your initial imaging??
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It's all a guesstimate till lumpectomy, when they can see and physically measure the actual tumor rather than an image. Originally on 8/17/15, my 20th annual routine screening mammo ahowed a "focal asymmetry not present on prior imaging," and suggested spot compression mammo and if necessary, ultrasound. 8/23, during ultrasound, the radiologist estimated the size of the mass as 7mm, BIRADS 4B. Biopsy was 9/8 (had to wait that long due to professional travel & performance obligations), and that radiologist said it was 9mm. Lumpectomy was 9/23, and the surgeon (and path report) said 1.3cm—nearly doubled in size from when first seen on US a month earlier.
Or did it? More than likely that the imaging was not as accurate as seeing it "in the flesh," in all dimensions. Maybe an MRI would have revealed a size closer to the actual tumor, but as I don't have dense breasts there was no indication for one. And considering both the biopsy & surgical path showed a Grade 2 Luminal A IDC, which is among the least aggressive, it is highly unlikely that it had doubled in size between discovery and removal.
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