Still worried about timing of things

Hi Tom, I'm in the UK but my diagnosis & treatment seems to have followed a v similar path to your wife's and I didn't start my hormone therapy until after radiotherapy had finished. Hope she is doing OK. 

The treatment path sounds about right to me. I had 4 TAC before surgery and had the surgery two weeks after the 4th TAC. Then a month later I was given the option of taking the final 2 TAC which I did. Following that, I did 30 rads about two weeks after the last TAC. After rads I began the anti-hormonal treatment. All told, it took about 6 months to get all treatments completed and start the anti-hormonals.

Try not to worry. I was "late" on almost everything and my MO said no worries to all of it, and I had grade 3. Got to sx 2 months after dx due to needing ps and bs both present. Had 4 drains in for 5 weeks instead of the average of up to 2 weeks. A couple weeks later the skin area above my right tissue expander became infected. 7 days of Amoxacilan did nothing so I was admitted to the hospital for 5 days of IV abx. Had a picc line placed and sent home for another week of self adminstered IV abx. Once all was clear, MO does the pre-chemo standard tests she does and finds I'm severely anemic. So 3 days of IV iron infusions. Sx was 8/6. Started chemo 11/3, exactly on the line of the most effectiveness of chemo, but what can you do. You have to be well before you undergo chemo. So all is going ok on schedule thereafter all the delays until on 2/27 I go to pay my BC insurance premiums through Covered CA exchanged and it's been cancelled. What?? Long story short, with a lot of back and forth for almost a month they had mistakenly changed my income to 0 and threw me on Medi-Cal. So my last chemo was about a month late. I had started rads when a week in I had both lungs partially collapse and so I was in the hospital for 3 days and the following I felt some chest pain so no rads for a couple days there--- a total of a week behind in rad schedule. So I had a longer than average active tx time line, starting 8/6/15 with bmx w/tissue expander placements to final rads completed mid-June 2016. I asked my MO how long do I have before needing to get on Tamox and she said up to a year but of course sooner if you can do it. I gave myself a month off to recover more from chemo and rads before popping the pill.

So the moral of the story is if you can't stick to the "schedule" it doesn't mean you are doomed. Plenty of things happen that interferes with getting tx and people wind up being fine.

Hi Tom,

Yep, It all sounds right to me.

Her tumor type is a slower growing, indolent type, then some other types of BCs, and yes chemo does remain in the tissues for a time. It is quite normal to expect things to move quickly, but healing from surgery and being off antiestrogens at time of rads is standard.

Also having more nodes at time of surgery is extremely common, as scans often do not pick them up unless they are quite large. I myself had 12 positive nodes, 2 were actually extraencapsulated and none of my nodes were detected on my PET scan.

She had a good response to her chemo which is extremely favorable.

Finally, rads does a good job of mopping up any residual cells. I also did not have clear margins either ( within 1 mm too) and am fine now approaching 12 years.

Sounds like you are a great support to your wife. Please reassure her she will ok!