No Chemo after Surgery...is this possible?

Also, ask about the oncotype dx test, which also helps to determine whether chemo would not be recommended a helpful.

early stage low grade ER+ with no node involvement can mean no chemo or rads if you have mx. That was the case for me. I did bmx with immediate DIEP flap recon and started taking an anti hormonal pill a couple months later to keep the estrogen from fueling the cancer cells (ER+). Current recommendation is to take that pill everyday for 5-10 years. As you are ER+, expect them to prescribe tamoxifen if premenopausal and femara/anastrozole/arimidex if post-menopausal. There are boards on BCO for all of the anti-hormonal therapy options.

You'll need either the mammaprint or oncotype test to decide if chemo is needed.  Are you getting either? 

I agree that you'd benefit from the Oncotype test. Other factors that go into the chemo or no chemo decision are your age, the size of the tumor, its Grade, how strongly ER+/PR+ your tumor is (ie, how effective will hormone blockers be).

Fwiw, at my center they don't like to say 'cured' though. You may still be at risk of recurrence which might be significantly higher than the 1/8 probability of developing bc in the first place. It seems the term most commonly used after treatment is finished is "NED: no evidence of disease". The uncomfortable fact is that for a certain percentage of us, it will recur and kill us. We just don't know which side of the probability curves we'll end up on.

You can input your tumor stats into a calculator like Predict and get an idea of how many people survive 5,10 & 15 years with just surgery alone.

http://www.predict.nhs.uk/predict_v2.1/tool

See how adding hormone therapy & chemo changes the outcomes (these stats are based are validated data sets but as always, they're from a few years back so for some cases, the actual current stats with current treatments might be yielding better survival rates). After your surgery and final pathology, your oncologist will run similar diagnostic tools and should present you with a treatment plan that lays out the percentage benefits of whatever treatment they recommend. At the end of the day, we all have to be comfortable with the risk/benefit analysis and make a decision that makes sense to us as individuals with complicated lives, dreams & whatever other health challenges we have.

About the rads - yes, I was told that if nodes were clean and the tumor was not very near the chest wall, rads would not be recommended after a mastectomy.

Good luck with your surgery. The waiting is hard - hope you're keeping busy.

best wishes ~