Does BC cause systemic systems if it has not spread?

Anecdotally, I can tell you that mine caused fatigue, decreased appetite, and weight loss (18% of my body weight) with only a micro metastasis to one node. But I don't know what the scientific answer is...

My symptoms started about 6 months before I felt the lump and 9months before actual diagnosis.

I also had night sweats but I'm perimenopausal and that's been going in for over a year.

I didn't feel well either, for awhile, maybe a year or so prior to dx. However I didn't have insurance and just couldn't afford any major medical expenses. I felt really fatigued and run down most of the time....like falling asleep at 9p all the time which was very unlike me.

I didn't notice anything different except my nails got really weak, which is not normal for me, and my hair got really gross and limp. On the other hand, during treatment I haven't noticed the fatigue everyone talks about as a side effect. Weakness and sickness, yes. But not fatigue. I actually seem to need far less sleep than I used to before diagnosis. Normal sleep for me befor diagnosis was 10-12 hrs. Soo....I dunno.

I felt I was in excellent health until my diagnosis. I had lots of energy and was busy taking on more responsibilities at work. If it hadn't been for that lump, I never would have thought I had cancer.

Felt great until I was diagnosed. I have a history of anxiety and depression. Now after mastectomy, expander removal, port surgery, chemo and radiation......I feel tired and over whelmed. I am 1 month out of rads and just overwhelmed. I have aches and pains and don't feel well in general. I'm thinking that my anxiety and depression are really contributing.

My annual mammogram in July 2014 didn't reveal any problems. In March of this year I had pain in side of rib cage and sternum, as well as some shortness of breath. I also felt like I had a sliver in the left breast, and blouses irritated the skin. I was experiencing fatigue as well, but put that down to the cold, relentless winter we were having. My doctor ran several tests and an MRI revealed several lesions across both breasts. A subsequent needle biopsy determined the lesions to be cancer. Shortly after, on June 1, I had a bilateral mastectomy.

The March symptoms are now gone, but did they really correlate to the breast cancer diagnosis? Who knows, but one thing for sure is that I wouldn't have discovered the breast cancer that early had it not been for the symptoms.

The medical term for the symptoms that some people experience before diagnosis that are not directly attributable to the effects of the tumor (but more like side effects) is called Paraneoplastic Syndrome. I've been fascinated by the subject since I was diagnosed because I felt I certainly could notice my body telling me that something wasn't right.

Here's a journal article on Paraneoplastic Syndrome if anyone is interested. There is quite a bit of info out there in the research publications. I have many journal articles on Paraneoplastic Syndrome saved over the last few years. While not an extremely common phenomena, it's considerably more prevalent in some cancers more than others--of which breast cancer is one of the more common, which could also be partly attributable to the sheer number of those diagnosed.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2931619/

You're welcome, mkinoly. Glad I could help.

A few months before diagnoses, I started to feel fatigued. I'd fall asleep on the couch before 10pm, and I'd never done that before. I also would on occasion feel nauseous now and then, but only briefly. What sucked though, was I had changed the way I ate before then and had more energy then ever before, and then all of a sudden...it felt like it was sucked away,even though I was still eating the same.

I also had fatigue and just didn't feel 'right'. I had some blood tests 6 months before I found the lump and some liver enzymes were raised - but I just took it as a sign to quit drinking for a while and eat better - which I did - even doing the liver cleansing diet.

The other thing I had was very vivid dreams before I found my lump. Dreams that were like I was drowning but then surfaced again, and powerful other ones like that - always like I was struggling to survive but overcoming it.

Very weird........