Pathology Back

My surgeon called to let me know the pathology on everything they removed during surgery. The bad news is that things were worse than they thought. The good news is, that means the mastectomy was 100% the right thing to do. 

The MRI underestimated the amount of cancer left. Apparently they examine the tissue in quadrants so all four quadrants of the breast still contained cancer and there WAS some of the original tumor left (which didn't show up on the MRI at all so we thought it was totally gone). But the margins were clear -- meaning it was all contained and there are no cancer cells on the outside edges of the tissue that was removed. 

They also dissected and examined the lymph nodes they removed and found isolated cancer cells in one of them. She said they are still considered "negative" as any node with less than 200 isolated cancer cells (individual cells that they actually count) is considered negative. I asked if this meant there could be isolated cancer cells in other nodes (still in my body) and she said no. They were only present in one node. If cancer cells had been throughout the five nodes they removed it might be a different story. So, they don't need to go back in or anything. This is a huge sigh of relief -- my armpit hurts enough with just the five taken out. So, while my heart stopped while she was talking to me, everything's okay. It just confirms as well that we got this in the knick of time, since the cancer was certainly heading out to the rest of my body. 

It was five weeks between when I first contacted my doctor to when I was diagnosed and within a week or two of being diagnosed my body was making it clear that something was wrong. If I hadn't been a little proactive before anything major was happening -- If I had waited until things were really obvious in late June -- we would be telling a different story today. I had pain for 2-3 weeks before I saw something seemed off on May 8, Mother's Day. I was diagnosed June 14 and started chemo July 7. I don't want the masses (or even James, who no doubt will have the potential for breast cancer hanging over her head her whole life, unfortunately) to be paranoid, but I can't stress enough -- if you think anything seems off, just go get it checked out. I was worried about seeming "paranoid" so I waited until something appeared off before I said anything to Daniel, let alone contacted my doctor. Better to be paranoid than the alternative. I will still be worried for the rest of my life that cancer is going to show up somewhere sometime. But it sure seems we caught this in the knick of time. Know your body. Be proactive. Use me as an excuse if you need to. Whatever. 

The surgeon's office is supposed to call me today (Monday) to set up an appointment for later in the week, I think just to go over the full path report in person. She said she is going to talk to my oncologist to confirm that radiation is the next step. At that I panicked, and asked if more chemo was a possibility. She said sometimes that can be the case, but no, I should be all good to move on to radiation once I'm done with the expanders. She still needs to pow wow with my oncologist about it first though. I love that everyone on the team is always communicating with the others, as has been the case throughout the last six months. 

That's about it. It was great having James here for the weekend. We had some good snuggle time on the couch watching cartoons. She, of course, loved the time with the rest of the gang here while Daniel had a little much-needed downtime to himself. My mom headed home today. I'll probably head home in a few days and will just have to try my best to do nothing despite wanting to jump in here and there. On that note, I've probably been typing far too long! Hopefully it should be pretty quiet around here for the next few weeks. Hope everyone is enjoying the snow -- at least it's pretty!