Never let them remove Lymph nodes

Research has shown that removing lymph nodes during lumpectomy serves of no benefit and actually creates several disadvantages to breast cancer patients. Not only are you removing the last line of defense, but the pain and swelling of future lymphodema simply makes removal of auxiliary lymph nodes a poor decision based on the facts.

Whenever you have surgery, doctors will tell you that something called angiogenesis takes place and the body creates inflammation in the surgery area and well as a flood of new blood vessel activity to heal the wound. This inflammation is a normal process of the body. The bad news is, this angiogenesis creates what is known as "seeding". Seeding is the escape of microscopic cancer cells into the blood stream. Removing the auxilliary lymph nodes creates more inflammation and massive blood flow to the area allowing cancer cells to escape into the blood stream and travel to other parts of the body long before you have an opportunity to have systemic chemo treatment to stop this seeding.

By the time a patient has chemo after removal of tumor and lymph nodes (usually two weeks) this is more than enough time for the cancer cells that escaped to settle in other parts of the body. Most of the top surgeons now agree that removal of lymph nodes offers no advantage to the patient and long term causes more problems with metastasis and swelling of the arm.

The best solution is to leave the lymph nodes alone and allow the systemic IV therapy to do its job on the lymph nodes and kill the cancer before it has seeded other parts of the body as a result of the surgery trauma and increased blood flow.

This is exactly what happened to me in 2013. I was scheduled to have a simple lumpectomy of a 2 cm tumor in my left breast. However, during surgery and without my prior knowledge, the surgeon removed 13 lymph nodes of which 9 were positive. What became of his poor decision was three addition years of pain and mysery. The cancer got out and seeded in my sternum, lungs, pelvis, ribs and skull. The cancer came back less than a year later with two new leisons growing on both sides of my lempectomy scar. I then had TOMO radiation on both as chemotherapy no longer worked. The cancer became immune to the chemo. I was estrogen positive and was unaware that chemo has little effect on ER positive, or hormonal driven cancers. If anything, it allows the cancer to build resistance.

The Tomo radiation took care of the tumors, but caused many other physical and mental issues in the year that followed. In a nutshell, removing those lymph nodes was the beginning of a nightmare. And it was totally unnecessary. I hope this post at least empowers others to be informed of the latest research before allowing a doctor to do something that has little benefit to your cance treatment.