Internal mammary lymph nodes found to be positive after surgery?

Thanks ladies, I appreciate your sweet messages. I know you're right- I am fortunate to have some answers and feel relieved the tumor board is looking at this. I'll get through this; I just hate for my children to have to watch this for the next year (or however long it all takes.) I guess it is what it is.

Hi all,

I've been remiss in sharing an update with you. The last two months since we found out I had at least one positive node on my right (cancer) side and suspicious nodes on my left side per a PET scan have been busy!

I was referred to a thoracic surgeon that removed the suspicious nodes on the left (non-cancer) side. There was one behind my sternum on the left, as well as several sub-pectoral nodes on the left. He removed all of these left side nodes and they were all benign. Thank God for false positives!

A few weeks later I had yet another surgery to remove the node on the right (cancer side) that we already knew from biopsy was malignant. 5 nodes were removed and only that one node had cancer in it; the other 4 were clear.

So the PET scan was mostly false positives, but if I hadn't had it, we wouldn't have known about the one lymph node on my cancer side that was malignant. Everyone is still stumped about how all the sentinel nodes and others removed during my double mastectomy last Nov. were totally clear, yet this one node had cancer. I've read about skip metastasis, but none of my doctors have really been able to explain it.

I still don't know what stage this puts me at since I'm not sure if the malignant node was a level 1, 2, or 3 axillary node. It could be anywhere from stage 1 to stage 3. I hope to see my oncologist this week for clarification. I will be starting radiation in the next few weeks for 5 1/2 weeks every day Mon-Fri. Not great, but my medical team doesn't seem to feel chemo is indicated now, so I have that to be thankful for at the moment. 6 months after radiation is completed, my plastic surgeon will hopefully be able to complete my reconstruction. I will have to keep these tissue expanders in until then...uncomfortable, but tolerable.

I hope all of you that were so supportive of me are continuing to do well. Sending you best wishes and hugs.

Hi Kathy,

One of the suspicious nodes was an internal mammary node behind the sternum. The doctors found it, among others that showed up on the PET scan and a subsequent CT scan to be concerning for metastasis. So, the internal mammary node, and several sub-pectoral nodes all were false positives and only an axillary node was actually cancerous.

My scan really stumped a lot of doctors and my case went before two separate tumor boards. Some felt confident that several of these nodes (particularly that internal mammary node) were malignant. In the end, it's very unusual that the cancer ended up where it did after 10 closer lymph nodes (closer to the original tumor) were all clear of cancer. But thankfully all the other spots that lit up (to varying degrees) were reactive to something, but not cancerous.

I hope this clarifies and thanks for the well wishes!