Sentinel lymph node biopsies after BMX

minmom24

I had "prophylactic" BMX on July 20th with tissue expanders placed. The biopsy from the BMX showed 1mm ILC in my left breast. Risk of node involvement is 14%, so I've been scheduled for sentinel lymph node biopsy on September 7th. Not sure what to expect. The breast surgeon talked about injecting a tracer, but after researching this, I started wondering where they would inject it. Any thoughts?

downdog

For a recurrence in an implant recon breast, the radioactive tracer is generally injected in the skin flap above the mastectomy scar and then checked to see if it maps to a nodal basin, so I presume yours will be handled similarly. There is some debate as to the predictive value of any sentinel nodes identified and removed, as there is no definitive way of knowing whether new lymphatic pathways developed post-mx. Since your BMX was fairly recent and not a lot of time has elapsed, yours should be able to be identified more reliably and with greater confidence. Best wishes for negative sentinel node(s).

farmerlucy

Hi minmom - I had a similar result from my PBM, except my surprise tumor was 1.1 cm. Total kick in the teeth, right? Anyway, I had a right sentinel node biopsy three weeks later. My BS said they had to wait for the area to heal before they tried the SNB otherwise everything would "light up". I went in early on surgery day for the dye insertion. I'm not sure where they decided to put it, but my BS gave the tech the specifics. The surgery itself was very very quick and my node was clear. A friend of mine had an ancillary node clearance for a surprise ILC. In retrospect I'm glad they tried the sentinel node biopsy for me.

Wicked

I will be having two SNBs (one on each side) during a BMX. My question is- when do you know the results of the biopsies? A friend told me she knew her SNB results before she left same day surgery for her lumpectomy. Is this the case for BMX too?

farmerlucy

For me it took a couple days to get the final pathology on the node..