Recently diagnosed and scared. Will I be okay?

Best advice is to trust your doctors, and if you don't trust them, find new doctors. Breast surgeons and oncologists usually have years of experience and have seen outcomes for thousands of patients and can assess your situation in light of their experience. Plus they rely on tools such as Cancer Math and Ajuvent Online, as well as more recent pathology tests that can make assessments from the tumour sample. There is an enormous body of completed and ongoing medical research that also drives treatment protocols and doctors' judgements. Having said this, there are no guarantees but the odds are on your side if you accept recommended treatments.

It sounds like your doctors have been very thorough in your testing. Which chemo was recommended? You can talk to others here who had the same chemo.

Are your doctors at a world class hospital? If so, that's another reason to be confident you are getting the best care available.

Further, treatments are improving all the time and almost every week there seems to be another advance in understanding of bc and treatments.

After completing chemo, oral antihormonal treatment will be recommended for five or more years to safeguard against recurrence.

For all these reasons, you can be optimistic.

Anything you want to know about regarding bc can be found on this site and there is a very large world wide community of members who can share their experiences with you, and vice versa.

Wishing you well; keep in touch. This diagnosis will take a year out of your life but you will come through stronger and wiser.

Lastly, if your anxiety becomes too great, you can seek counselling or even medication to help with that. I did.

Hi ATXgirl - we've all been there. We get it.

just know that it gets better (& then sometimes worse and then better again...it's a process but our sisters & brothers here know it well...)

It's a scary, life changing diagnosis. Hang in there & keep coming to chat with us. The monthly chemo threads will be a great resource for you once you start. Also if you haven't yet had surgery, check out the surgery support threads.

rounds vary depending on the protocol & drug. When I did the AC portion of my chemo it was one treatment every 2 weeks, and each treatment was considered a round. But my taxols are weekly and each set of 3 is considered a round. So it depends. When they give you a chemo recommendation they should give you a written handout explaining the protocol & scheduling. Sometimes there are delays if you're sick or your blood counts are too low. Two of my AC treatments were delayed because of neutropenia.

Chemo is mostly just going to a place to get an iv placed in your arm (or some places surgically implant a port and then they attach the drip in that) and then you sit in a lazy boy chair for about 2-4 hrs and then you go home. I bring an ipad and watch netflix. Others chat with their friends while others sleep through it all.

Sometimes there are pills to swallow too. Nausea is usually well controlled. Depending on the chemo and the other meds they give you, you might be really sleepy during the infusion. My dh drives me home from all of them but I know some people are able to drive themselves - depends on the drugs (& how stressed they are)

If you just randomly pick one of the monthly threads in the chemo forums and start reading through you'll hear about most of the common complaints: fatigue, aches and pains, constipation or diarrhea, loss of taste, loss of appetite, mouth sores... & of course hair loss.