Mom's got breast cancer

Hi everyone,

My first message here, so I'll start with a bit of personal info. I'm Chantal, a 34 year-old woman from the Netherlands. I'm the youngest of 3 siblings and I am single, just like my sister and brother.

Early December, mom went for her periodic mammogram. She's 63 so she gets one every other year. A week later, she received a call telling her she needed to come back for another scan and a biopsy. This happened a few days before christmas, so we wouldn't know anything until after the holidays. We tried to make the best of it, but we didn't exactly have a very pleasant christmas.

On January 4, I accompanied my mom to the breast clinic where she was told she has IDC. We kind of already knew. I bet most of you recognize that feeling, where you already know in your heart of hearts that it's going to be bad news, even though statistics are in your favor. Still, even though we had suspected the news would be bad, we had been hoping for it to be a benign growth.

The news has thrown us right back on the roller coaster we were just getting off. You see, mom left her husband a year ago, because of domestic violence. He's been trying to stay in control of our lives and has even hacked a facebook account to check up on us. Things seemed to be calming down and then mom found out she has cancer. When it rains, it pours...

Though I have a sister (42) and a brother (40), mom has chosen me to be her primary caregiver. I'm honored to be given that much trust and responsibility, but I'm also quite fearful of the time ahead. We don't know the complete diagnosis yet, because mom hasn't had her surgery yet. We're hoping it's stage IIa, but we won't know until February. Mom gets a mastectomy on the 28th of January so obviously, we won't know whether or not it's mastestesized until then. We do know it's come back negative on all hormone receptors so that's not very good news. And judging by the location of the tumor, we could even be looking at stage IV, because it sits right up against her rib cage. So yeah, we're very worried.

Anyway, I was quite shocked to find out there aren't any properly active breast cancer forums in my own country, which is why I signed up for this one. I'm really hoping to find some support here. For mom of course, in case she has questions. But also for myself, as I only have 2 friends: one in Australia and one in France. So that means I have nobody to fall back on and that scares me. I hope to be welcomed here and I hope I can count on the good people on this forum when mom has questions. Her English isn't very good so I'll be writing here on her behalf as well as my own.

Thanks for reading and all the best to everyone who's currently fighting, both the patients as well as the people around them.