Chemo Dilemma

Charnyaramanh · September 2013

Hi All,

This happened to my mom almost 2 years back but I still don't understand it. My mother opted for neoadjuvant therapy and had 4 cycles of chemo before the surgery. She had a radical mastectomy with 17 lymph nodes removed, but the strange thing is her biopsy report post surgery says no cancer cells found in both the primary location and the lymph nodes. I still dont understand this. I mean did she have cancer at all. How can there be no trace of it at all??

annika12 · September 2013

I don't know for sure but I think that is what you want after chemo. Doesn't mean it wasn't there before but isn't there anymore!!!

dogsandjogs · September 2013

Did she have a biopsy when the lump was found? And then had the chemo? Are you asking why didn't they discover the cancer was gone after the chemo so she could have avoided the mastectomy and the node removals? Not sure how that works. I guess the only way they could have checked would have been another biopsy. And then the mastectomy wouldn't have been needed. But they would have had to check the sentinel node also.

GraceB1 · September 2013

They do the surgery even if you have no evidence of cancer after the chemo. They want to make sure that they have all the little cells of cancer that may be present, even those that don't show up on PET scans or MRIs or on a particular slide from the removed tissue. I asked my MO about this because I hoped to avoid surgery and he said that wasn't going to happen. A great response to the chemo is terrific, just what you want. Don't fret too much over staging. You should have had a preliminary stage before chemo started. Your stage has to change a bunch before the treatment changes.

Chemo Dilemma

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