Just diagnosed

Welcome, Flo! Glad you found us, though we hate that you have to be here for this reason.

We know the waiting is horrible, and it can be all really confusing right now, just know that you are not alone! Many of our members say once you have all the information and a treatment plan in place you start to feel like you're regaining control, so it will get easier!

Besides the wonderful support you'll get from other members here, we recommend you to visit the section Breast Cancer 101 of our main Breastcancer.org site. It's been designed for those newly diagnosed and will help you learn more about what to expect now and what to ask your doctors. We hope this helps!

Good luck with further tests and please, come back to let us know how you're doing!

The Mods

Hi Flo80,

The stage will depend a lot on the size. But moderately differentiated and ER+/PR+ are all positive for prognosis, and HER2+ would not change that (though it would change the treatment steps).

MRI can inflate the size, because of swelling related to the biopsy - that's what my surgeon told me. The surgeon might be able to give you their prediction of the size. Mine thought that it would be closer to the biopsy estimate than the MRI estimate. She was right, though it was higher than the biopsy estimate.

All that said, they won't know stage until after post-surgery pathology of both tumor and lymph nodes. You could literally be anywhere on the staging chart depending on how your lymph nodes, size, grade, and punch biopsy come back. The waiting part is incredibly hard.

What stage does is statistically group you with people at similar risk for recurrence, including distant recurrence. But remember that statistics are truly useful in the aggregate - for health policy makers, health insurance companies, setting standards of care, etc. They can't tell you what will happen to you as an individual. Stage 1a folks can and do recur and pass away, and Stage 3b folks live long lives with no recurrence. Even some Stage 4 folks are live for a decade or more now. You never know which bucket you're in until you either recur or die of something else that's not breast cancer related.