Last month I had a mammogram, then got called back for a follow up mammogram. Then they did an ultrasound, and a few days later they asked me to come in for a beast biopsy, then another focused mammogram. After that, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I went back in for an MRI for more information.
It is invasive ductile carcinoma, 8 mm in size in the mammogram and ultrasound, but 2.2 cm in the MRI. It is triple negative, which means it doesn’t have receptors for estrogen, progesterone, or HER2, so I’ll need chemotherapy.
Monday I spoke with Dr Gadd, a breast surgeon at Southern NH Medical Center who is from Mass General Hospital. She suggested that I would start with chemotherapy for 3 - 4 months, then have surgery to remove the tumor and test a sentinel lymph node. This lets them see how the drugs affect the tumor, lets the drugs kill any errant cancer cells that may have found their way to the lymph nodes, and could shrink the tumor down to nothing.
Tuesday, I spoke with oncologist Dr Sheib and breast surgeon Dr Rhei, both at Dana Farber in Massachusetts. They said because of the discrepancy in size, they would bring it before the tumor board of 10 doctors to plan a course of action.
Then when we got home, they called to ask us to schedule an ultrasound in Boston to look at my axillary lymph nodes. If they’re clear, they suggest starting with a 5-month series of chemotherapy followed by surgery, then radiation. The main possible side effects of this are lower white blood cell counts, hair loss, and tiredness. If the nodes aren’t clear, they’ll discuss the next plan, which may involve immune therapy.
I didn’t know much about chemotherapy. If it’s not triple negative, you can usually receive oral drugs that can shrink the tumor, but if triple negative, you get IV chemo. I’ll be going once every two or three weeks (depending on blood counts, I guess) to get one treatment of the chemo.
Everyone kept emphasizing that this is survivable, curable, and has a good prognosis.
They also kept emphasizing that things have changed drastically over the years on treatment. They minimize the number of lymph nodes removed, have ways to get the chemotherapy into cells when they are triple negative, & they try to shrink the tumor as much as possible before removing it.
Next steps are scheduling the ultrasound, choosing who to go with, and scheduling starting chemotherapy.
So something nice happened after Monday’s appointment. We did a good deed on our way out: a man asked us for help because he couldn’t figure out how to install his baby’s car seat. The hospital said he had to have it installed right so he could pick up his wife and baby! Took us 20 minutes, because his car was missing a lap belt for the middle seat and they’d told him that’s where it had to be. Finally got it after they said on the side was ok! He was very happy and thankful!
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