Stage IV confirmed yesterday

hi.sorry to find you here with us, but the women here are warm and welcoming and a plethora of information.

Once you are staged IV you can’t go back...sorry. But you aren’t waiting to die, you’ll just be on some sort of medication for the rest of your life..so far you are in a great place with only lymph involvement. If they can keep it that way, you’ll live to a nice old age....even if it spreads, the treatments these days are pretty in incredible. I was Stage IV in 2011. Almost 7 years later and I live a pretty normal life. A little different than before...but still ok.

I did have surgery and hard chemo in 2011, but they tend not to be that aggressive anymore. I think they found it doesn’t really stop progression, if progression is gonna happen, and the surgeries themselves are not really good for cancer. Too much trauma.

The oral treatments are really good.

Stefanie

Sorry to hear you have been left in a sort of limbo land. I can relate to the confusion and frustration this diagnosis causes. I share a similar experience. Once you are diagnosed Stage IV, it seems that will remain. Since there is breast cancer found in distant lymph nodes, that means metastasis has occurred and as my MO said, the horse is already out of the barn. Those nasty microbast*rd cancer cells have traveled to who knows where, though they are not currently large enough or active enough for detection.

The downside is, as I understand it, we will always be on treatment as there is no cure. But that doesn't mean we cannot find NED and there is an arsenal of therapies available. The upside I found is detailed in an article from Science News titled something like, 'doing less does more' for patients, research suggests. There are many articles out there outlining the benefits of current treatment protocols over the older standards of treating breast cancer. I can't really talk to the "good" or "bad" of this almost semi-Stage IV protocol, as each person's situation is unique, but that cancer is a crap shoot is for certain. My precarinal lymph nodes weren't even biopsied yet I was given a Stage IV diagnosis with no cancer detected through scans anywhere else. I was diagnosed last July, so I am very new to all this too, but I'm happy to answer/share whatever I can. This sucks, but you are not alone and you don't have to wait around for cancer to kill you--even though it may seem so right now. I hope your MO will give you satisfactory answers.

Jan