In shock

Bennymuffins, I also am Canadian, and understand when you said you went from perfectly healthy one day to having BC and planning your funeral the next. I think that is a normal response, At least I hope so as I did the exact same thing. I was eating right, biking 22 km. 6 days a week, and I still got BC, no family history except an aunt and apparently that is not considered. I also was in shock, but as you move through your doctors apps and educate yourself on BC you will begin to relax.



Just curious if it was your GP who told you the lymph nodes were all going to be removed? This would not be his area of expertise. I would not rely on my GP, only your surgeon or oncologist's opinions.



So sorry about the loss of your horses, I do think stress doesn't help, but you most likely already had your cancer? When I was dx we were 2 weeks away from a planned vacation down the Oregon coast to Disneyland, Vegas and home. That got cancelled. My hair was to my waist until about 8 days ago I braided it and chopped it off, then went to town to touch it up. I will probably lose what I have mid Sept....it is sad but at least we are moving forward and live in a time that we can treat our cancer. So I hope you have some friends to hold your hand, and help you through this.

The ladies on this forum will guide you, they have been so helpful for me. We will give you strength.

Edithester, I am thinking of you telling your kids, hope it went well. (hugs)

bless you x

thank you bearcub, x

edithesther 

There have been quite a few stories related on this web site of children treating their mother selfishly and cruelly, being "unfriended" on facebook.  

Personally, if anyone, including children treat me poorly, I shut them out of my mind and will not give them to power to hurt me.  For me, it works.  You have to protect yourself from narcissistic, spoiled children.  It must give those children a lot of pleasure to hurt mom.  How immature and childish.  I have a son like this but he cannot hurt me.

I also forgot to mention the one thing that is sort of "nice" maybe not the best choice in words, but for lack of a better word is at least if you are stage 3, as I was, most of the choices about treatment are made for you. In other words, I feel sympathy for people who have options...if you are on the border should you do chemo or rads or should you pass. It would be so hard to know what is right if you have a choice so in some ways I was lucky, stage 3 left no options, hit it with all you got.



As I said I am 3 years ot of stage 3 totally clear scan last Fri I was grade 3 and had 4-5 positive nodes before chemo. I expect to live another 10, 20 years, hopefully long enough to blow through my 401(k). I am only 44 : )



Thinking of you and you have hope! Treatments evolve everyday. I hope every day they make progress and if I hit stage 4 in 10 years maybe by then there will be a cure or new targeted therapies that buy me time and quality of life.



It is true that we are all dying every day but once you have cancer you are just much more are of it. That sort of stinks but on the other side of the coin you can choose to live with much greater conscious intent!



Big hugs

Lesley

 Lesleyanne67 

 That is so true.  It is recognised that DCIS patients have the most torturous time making decisions. 

Benny, your path report is confusing, but I wanted to try and make some guesses.  From what I understand this is a path report following a core biopsy, correct?

If so, the core samples have found DCIS.  DCIS is not an invasive type of cancer, as you know.  However since there is cancer in the nodes, it is clear there is an invasive component, which in all likelihood did not get taken up by the core needle. It is not unusual to find a bunch of different things in a breast and tumors can be mixed, containing DCIS plus other abnormal things, including invasive cancers.

In this case the word "metastasized" means it has metastasized to the lymph nodes, but not necessarily to the body as a whole.  It is a fearful thing to see that word, but in your case they really do not know if you have systemic mets.  This is why they will do the CT, PET, etc, so they can get a full picture of what is going on.  Some doctors use that word to describe a cancer that has gone into the lymph nodes from it's orignal source.  I think it sounds really scary and wish they did not say it that way.  Finding "mets to the nodes" is not the same thing as mets to the body.  Many women have postive nodes and survive completely.  If positive nodes are found it is the correct protocol to do the various scans that your doctors are recommending, so they are doing the right thing and it does not mean they think they will definitely find anything.  It's just the next step that is correct to take to give you the  best treatment plan.

I know you are so scared and it's been the worst time.  Don't be afraid to seek some counseling or ask for some medication to reduce your anxiety.  Just take things day to day or hour by hour if necessary.  We have all been there, right in your shoes, where sometimes it's all about just getting from one moment to the next.  ALSO don't rely on the stats you see on the net because they are old, outdated and not useful.  Treaments have changed and continue to change so fast that the survival stats are not up to date on the net. 

@bennymuffins, I also want to respond to something you wrote Friday, that the survival statistic for stage IIb is only 41%. I'm not sure where you got that statistic from, but out of curiosity I went to an online cancer statistical site and put in as much information as I could, based on what you've written so far. You have IDC, Grade 3, with at least one node affected, hormone and HER2 status not yet known. Working backward from stage definitions that would mean your tumor is between 2 and 5 cm diamter. I plugged this information into the calculator and got 42% survival at 15 years after diagnosis, very close to what you mentioned. But that statistic is for Stage 2 with no treatment*!

With appropriate treatment, the survival rate for stage IIb is much better than you've been thinking. For example, if your cancer turns out to be ER+, just adding hormonal therapy (tamoxifen followed by an aromatase inhibitor) increases the probability of survival to 58%. With chemotherapy in addition to hormonal therapy, survival rate improves even more. I didn't see an option in this particular calculator to put in Herceptin treatment for HER2+ tumors, but I would expect to see an increase in survival rate from that too. I used a free online calculator, but it gave me very similar results (for my diagnosis) to the Adjuvant!online results my oncologist showed me, and I would expect them to be similar for your diagnosis too.

You asked how to stay positive, and I agree it is hard, especially before you have all your diagnostic information and a treatment plan. Even if you can't stay positive, don't give up before you're licked! Breast cancer is scary and serious but it can be treated. I don't think your outlook is as bleak as you may have been thinking on Friday. Hang in there!

 Edited to add: Nobody, including you, can know whether cancer has spread to other parts of your body until the scans have been done. Stop torturing yourself! If frightened thoughts keep intruding, distract youself! Play a zillion games of Freecell, or rent a funny movie, or clean your house from top to bottom, or something, anything, but worrying about this. You can only think about one thing at a time, and if you deliberately put some other thought into your mind, cancer thoughts will be pushed out, at least temporarily.

* I'm not sure whether "no treatment" in these statistics means surgery only, or no treatment whatsoever.  Whichever it means, adding hormone therapy, chemotherapy and/or herceptin, as appropriate, greatly increase survival rates vs omitting these treatments.

Benny for what it's worth it is possible to never find the primary and have spread to nodes or even mets. Unusual though. 

I still think someone is mixing up stage three and grade three. 

Benny,

Beacon, curveball, cookiegaland FilterLady have all provided great information and advice. Just to confirm, a core needle biopsy only pulls up a few small samples of breast tissue. So the fact that yours only found DCIS in your breast does not mean that you only have DCIS.  In about 20% of cases where a needle biopsy only finds DCIS, the final surgery ends up finding invasive cancer. In your case, since it's known that you have cancer in your nodes, it's almost certain that your surgery will uncover some invasive cancer in your breast.  But it's still possible that it might not.  In my case I had over 7cm of DCIS and only 1mm of invasive cancer.  Such a small amount of invasive cancer could easily have been missed by the pathologist, hidden in there with all that DCIS. But just that tiny amount of invasive cancer meant that I had a 10% chance of having lymph node involvement.  I was lucky - my nodes were clear - but I could have been in a situation where I had nodal involvement and yet the tiny amount of IDC was never found in my breast.  It doesn't happen often, but it does happen.  

As for the cancer in your nodes, it does sound as though there is a mix-up between grade 3 and stage 3.  Staging is based on a total assessment of the cancer - the size of the tumor in the breast; the number of nodes affected, if any; and whether or not there is any metastasis beyond the nodes.  This is called TNM staging - "T" for tumor, "N" for nodes, and "M" for metastasis.  Without all that information - which you won't have until after surgery and after all the other tests - you don't know your stage.  Your doctor might provide a preliminary guess about your stage based on the screening tests and the biopsy (this is callled "clinical staging") but just the nodes alone wouldn't be staged.  So based on all that, my guess is that the cancer in your nodes is grade 3, not stage 3.

As for the other symptoms you're having, as beacon said, this is really common among women who've been diagnosed.  My cancer was very early stage, but as soon as I was diagnosed, I started noticing all sorts of strange things - headaches, bone aches in my legs, etc..  Being convinced that your cancer has spread, or at least being really worried that it has, probably is something that 90% of us felt when we were first diagnosed.  But in the end most of us were diagnosed with early stage breast cancer which had not spread.

There is no way to know yet what your final diagnosis will be. It sounds as though the information you have at this point puts your clinical diagnosis at Stage IIA. With luck, that's where your diagnosis will stay once you get all the information from your surgery and tests.   

Benny - all of your feelings are normal. It's hard to thing anything but the worst when you don't know exactly what you're dealing with. Once you get all of your tests and can understand your exact diagnosis, it will help, trust me. You need to know what you're dealing with. The beginning is definitely the darkest time. That's normal. Just take it one day at a time. I was diagnosed exactly two years ago at age 44 with a very aggressive cancer (see my diagnosis below) below and I remember having those scary thoughts too. Allow the tears to flow, if you have any left! I promise it will get better.

Kathy

bennymuffins 

Muffins, I know that feeling of dread.  But all the emotions you are going through right now are just feelings.  They don't do any good.  They just put you into depression.

Try to be objective.  When you get all the info, you will feel better because then, you can do something about it. 

I thought when a person signed an informed consent it includes more extreme measures than thought going in.  I would hate to be awakened from anesthesia for bad news. 

 Its too bad old timers rarely come on here.  They drift away and get cancer out of their lives and out of their minds. 

A couple of months ago a woman signed in to bring everyone up to date.  She was dx about 5 years ago with Stage 3 at the same time as her husband was also Stage 3 for some kind of internal cancer.  They both got through it and moved to Hawaii because life is precious and they were going to enjoy it from now on. 

It was very uplifting and I wish more success stories would come on here rather than all of us who are in the same troublesome boat. 

Ok, I'll tell my story based on what infobabe said in the post above. I was diagnosed exactly two years ago this weekend, stage 3a, grade 3, triple negative (very aggressive) at age 44. You can see all my stats in my signature below. Since that time I've been to Italy to see my daughter who was studying abroad in her junior year of college, been to vegas twice to celebrate a bunch of birthdays, went to Disneyland to celebrate my great nieces 5th birthday, and have just finished planning a trip to Jamaica in June to celebrate our daughters college graduation! Oh yea, and my son graduated high school in may and has just started college. So now my husband and I are figuring out how to be empty nesters, although we still have our other child at home (our golden retriever). This is gonna be a great chapter too! That's not to say its all rainbows and sunshine. I've had some extra scans and stuff along the way, but they've all come out clear. So we're enjoying every day. Nobody knows when their time is up. You will get to this point too. Remember that there is light at the end of the tunnel. The tunnel just feels really long right now, but you will come out on the other side. Hugs to you all who are just beginning this journey!

Kathy