Lumpectomy Lounge....let's talk!

Sloan, i remember the skeeter spray truck. It's a wonder we didn't all get cancer from breathing in those chemicals (prolly DDT!)

Mlp, i am 5wks PFC and my hair is about 1/2"-1" long, very patchy looking.I have a nurse conference coming up in San Diego in early April. I sure hope my hair looks better by then!

MLP3, Lordy if I drank a bottle of wine, I'd NEVER get out of the bathroom! One glass is my limit. Glad your MO is fine with the red wine! I'll take that as gospel.

Brithael, I don't blame you for the virgin drinks during chemo. Chemo messes with so many things. I can't remember if my DIL drank during chemo or not.

Molly, that was my thought about our how-you-put-on-your-bra discussion. One of my faves. Though I must admit I love the creative French phrases for our power surges!

Sloan, I don't remember skeeter trucks but they sprayed the lake a block from me and I think also the whole neighborhood. IIRC we weren't allowed outside when this was being done.

Poodles, however your hair looks in April, in San Diego whatever you wear or don't wear on your head will be right in style! #1 son lives in SD and everything goes. Don't give it another thought - go naked, wild wig, scarves, whatever - it will work perfectly and you'll look beautiful no matter what!

Okay, I've dithered as long as I can. Time to get to work. (But it's so much more fun here!)

HUGS!

Moondust- Wondering if the swelling you mentioned is a seroma? If so, it cold take quite awhile for it to be reabsorbed. About 6 weeks or so for me. Hope others will chime in on that.

Sounds like your animals keep you busy. Having gotten a horrific staph infection from a tiny splinter in August- almost lost 1/2 of a finger due to that during chemo- am glad you and 1Step are taking precautions!

Peggy- YAY- you are BACK and sounding like yourself. Hoping you don't overdo- dithering can be a good thing!

Am a hook in front- slide around to the back gal as well. Am also going to look at some sites for matching bras/panties. That might be a fun way to celebrate the weight loss and feel good under my clothes- am thinking DH might approve

Thanks HH! Post op nurse yesterday couldn't believe I wanted to ski this weekend! But a nice walk in the woods is on the agenda for sure this weekend!

My mo didn't give me a script for a wig... Should I have gotten one? I'd like to get into Boston next week and get one where Peachy got hers because it takes 2 weeks to make.

MLP3 - Yes, get a Hair Prosthesis prescription from the MO. Then the nice gals at the salon will review it and use the same verbiage on the receipt so that that the two documents match for your insurance claim. Drive safe! (Still snowing here in Lowell!)

MLP- Asked PA at MO's office and she wrote wig script. Think it has to say "cranial prosthesis" to try to get ins to cover all or part of cost.

MabelJo, sorry you are poorly today. Drink lots of water and rest. Your wire insertion story was funny, it made me giggle. You re a trooper for sure.

MabelJo: Oh, no! (laughing in sympathy) I mean, i suppose fainting is marginally better than puking; the radiologist would probably prefer catching you to dealing with the alternative. But welcome to the group, and sorry for the reason you came here. (We've all had embarrassing things happen. Trust me.)

Oh my, MabelJo- what an awful experience- though a bit funny as I could just picture how it played out in my mind! Glad you found us- lots of informative, supportive and sometimes zany women here. Hope you feel better. Remember, ice and rest are your best friends right now.

MLP- sorry your son had to be dug out but glad all is well. No, they never listen. I like the pink panty idea.

Peggy, glad you are starting to feel better. Thanks for the swollen boob info (and for heading up this fabulous forum!). Mine is not so big that it bothers me (yet). I am a D cup, and the bad one started out slightly bigger. I was hoping it would end up smaller so they match. Maybe it will after rads. That's what the RO told me. I don't really care how they look, just as long as I can stuff 'em in a bra and not look too lopsided in clothes. But anymore, it's low on my list of things to be concerned about. At 61 I'm not planning to enter any swimsuit competitions.

Praline, maybe they don't recommend chemo because if you have a good chance of surviving 15 years without chemo, that means you'll probably make it past 89, which is past the life expectancy for women. I saw a web page that told how many days each treatment would add to your life, (but of course didn't bookmark it). For example, chemo might add 200 days to your life. So if chemo adds 200 days to your life but gives you 200 days of misery right now, maybe it would not be worth it.

MLP, happy to hear you'll be hiking in the snow. Do you have snowshoes? I have used mine twice this winter so far. I have a friend in Canada who is having neoadjuvant chemo for her aggressive ER-/PR- cancer. She is not even done with treatment but her hair is starting to come back. Your son sounds typical for his age. My son totaled two cars in his late teens/early 20's. Now at 22 he's in the Army (Korea) and already married to his home town sweetheart. (We'll see how that turns out).

HappyHammer, thanks for chiming in about boob swelling. I see my BS in a couple of weeks and I'll see what she thinks.

MabelJo, we'll keep you company while you wait for results. That procedure sounded awful. I hated having the wire put in my breast before surgery too.

I hope everyone who drinks alcohol will consider the following: Alcohol has recently been shown to be a breast cancer risk even at low to moderate levels. I hope it okay to quote a recent article from Medscape:

"In August of 2015, data were published from two large, prospective, ongoing cohort studies—the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study.[6] During long-term follow-up (up to 30 years) of 88,084 women and 47,881 men, 19,269 and 7571 incident cancers were diagnosed, respectively (excluding nonadvanced prostate cancers). Alcohol consumption was significantly associated with increased risk for cancer, in both women (P trend<.001) and men (P trend=.006), with linear dose-response relations. The increased risk for cancer appears to be significant at lower levels of alcohol consumption in women than in men, and total alcohol consumption, rather than regularity of drinking or heavy episodic drinking, drove the association between alcohol consumption and risk for cancer....
Another recent study looked at breast cancer specifically.[9] A dose-response relationship exists between alcohol and breast cancer in pre- and postmenopausal women. In an analysis of the European Prospective Investigation Into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC), 334,850 women, aged 35-70 years at baseline, were recruited in 10 European countries and followed an average of 11 years. Alcohol intake at baseline and average lifetime alcohol intake were calculated from country-specific dietary and lifestyle questionnaires. During a total of 3,670,439 person-years, 11,576 incident breast cancer cases were diagnosed. Alcohol consumption was significantly related to breast cancer risk; each 10-g/day increase in alcohol intake raised the hazard ratio by 4.2% (95% CI, 2.7%-5.8%). Compared with an alcohol intake of 0-5 g/day (up to one half drink), an alcohol intake of 6-15 g/day (0.5-1.5 drinks) was associated with a 5.9% increase in breast cancer risk (95% CI, 1%-11%). Risk was elevated for both hormone receptor-positive and hormone receptor-negative breast tumors and was stronger among women who started drinking before their first full-term pregnancy. The full complement of evidence to date is sufficient to conclude that alcohol is causally related to the development of breast cancer, both premenopausally and postmenopausally, and that the risk increases dose-dependently with no lower threshold.[5]"

I am alcohol free by choice because I don't want to support an industry that has caused so many problems in the lives of people I know. This includes my DH who is in AA and sober. JMO, it is one of those things that everyone finds a way to justify if you are in the habit of having it.

I just got all my support meds for going into radiation and then after from my Natural-path One bit of advice I was give was to drink red wine while doing my radiation treatments. There are studies showing the benefits of the red wine which talk about it being an antioxidant. So the irony is that I don't like red wine and I don't really drink! My husband is thrilled with this for we are going to go wine shopping. I will drink apple cider vinegar, Kombucha, wheatgrass and greens etc yet wine is of no interest. He find those to be the worst thing ever and now I get red wine. Other advice was no processed sugar while on radiation.

No offense to your naturopath, but he's got it bass-ackwards about both the wine and those other beverages: you DON'T want antioxidants during radiation (also during chemo) because the whole point of both rads & chemo is to PROMOTE, not PREVENT tumor cell destruction. Antioxidants don't distinguish between tumor and normal cells and they protect ALL your cells from the free radicals that cause cell destruction. You want those rays to kill any residual tumor cells in the breast!!!

The mechanism by which alcohol is a risk factor for getting breast cancer is that alcohol inhibits the liver's ability to clear estrogen from the body--so it's more important to teetotal if your tumor is ER+. The study cited is strictly retrospective and anecdotal, and the data for ER- women's risk may not be relevant (except perhaps while those women's tumor cells were still merely hyperplastic they had estrogen receptors but once they had matured and become carcinoma, they lost the receptors--just as most DCIS starts out overexpressing HER2 but once most of those cells acquire the ability to become invasive they stop overexpressing it--and thus when diagnosed as IDC, they test as HER2-). Alternatively, alcohol inhibits the liver's ability to clear a variety of toxins (not just the body's own estrogen) and those substances themselves might be carcinogens.

When I asked about wine, my BS' nurse replied “moderation in all things." My PCP said cut back to a 3-oz rather than a 5-oz. glass if I want one with dinner but no need to have it every day if I don’t feel like it. My BS herself said 3 drinks a week (5 oz. glass of wine) were okay. My MO said 2 drinks. And my shrink--himself a wine connoisseur--said “no amount of alcohol is safe" when it comes to breast cancer risk. But left unanswered is whether light-to-moderate alcohol consumption is a risk factor for recurrence, especially in ER+ women taking AIs which shut down nearly all estrogen production anyway.

As to the kombucha, cider vinegar, wheatgrass, and greens (except green tea), that has nothing to do with cancer. They are all probiotics, which are essential to maintaining healthy gut flora--especially if you tend to get queasy from rads.

I'm on an AI but I also must hold the line on my weight--loss would be (metaphorical) gravy or icing on the (equally metaphorical) cake. And alcohol has calories, though the calories and carbs in dry wines are not processed the same way as are sugars. So I am not going to deny myself a small glass or two (half-pours) of really good wine if my dinner would suffer without it, if it's really worth drinking, (Not always a given--I don't like getting a buzz, so I'm not going to drink anything mediocre just because it's there, everyone else is drinking, and/or I've had a stressful day). I often find myself going several days without touching a drop, mostly because my meal didn't call for it or because it wasn't absolutely wonderful.

My MO yesterday said it wouldn't be her place to do a lipid panel or glucose test--that would be my PCP's province. As for metformin, she said the data as to its tumor-inhibition is promising but the study is still not finished; it does raise LDLs and long-term use carries liver disease risks. So she favors combating any higher glucose and a1c allegedly caused by AIs with changes in diet and exercise. As to bone-strengtheners, she agrees that for me the esophageal risk from an oral bisphosphonate outweighs its benefit. She feels Reclast/Zometa is more effective in preventing recurrence than is Prolia--though Prolia is given by injection rather than IV drip and has fewer or less severe side effects. Prolia is many, many orders of magnitude costlier and most insurers (including Part D plans) either won't cover it or make it Tier 5 (highest co-pay). But what scares the crap out of me regarding even infused bisphosphonates (Reclast) or injected biologic (Prolia) is that, with a long-term history of jawbone loss from periodontal disease well into my 20s, jaw osteonecrosis is a real threat even if rare; and that instances of spontaneous horizontal femoral fracture (more so with Reclast than Prolia) have been increasingly reported--why subject myself to a thighbone snapped in two when my osteopenia might not become osteoporosis and I might never get a hip or spine fracture from untreated AI-induced bone loss?

Mets=metastases, i.e., the spread of cancer cells from the original tumor to distant locations in the body (organs, bone, brain, etc.). Local lymph node involvement is technically “mets" because the lymph nodes are not breast tissue per se, but lymph node involvement without evidence of distant spread or distant recurrence is considered Stage II or III and not really mets--true mets are classified Stage IV.

Hate to be a (literal) buzz-kill, but my MO said the THC component (the stuff that produces the high) of weed is estrogenic. Pure CBD (or strains of weed that lack THC) does work against nausea, anorexia, cachexia and the pain from Stage IV mets. But she won’t sign a medical cannabis card application for patients at earlier stages not in danger of malnutrition from chemo--the munchies can lead to weight gain in those of us who need to maintain or lower our body weight; Also, it hasn’t been shown to reduce AI-induced joint, bone or muscle pain; and studies demonstrating any tumor-growth inhibition are strictly biochemical and in vitro. If I had a nickel for every treatment that looked great in vitro or in animals but bombed in human trials.....I could buy some primo weed.

Yep- while a literal buzz kill...personally never really got the whole weed thing...made my throat hurt! Having a real melancholy day- glad to report my surgeon checked the node area and while a bit swollen- I have a runny nose and fluid in left ear so attributing it all to that....the surgeon on call did say to be diligent which made me feel better about the freak out Sad news- a very unexpected thing happened-a long time coworker though distant friend now died last night of a massive heart attack. Just so sad- he was an absolutely wonderful man- such a sweet family and his rapport with the kids at school- unbelieveable. He was 55. His wife- a friend- had fallen asleep on the couch and when she headed to bed- found him at 2 am. He was already gone. WHile it is the best way to go....it is so hard for family and friends. I worry about my BC and then, this happens...helps put things in perspective. Hugs to ALL!