Crippled to make a decision. Need your help!

To me this comes down to her feelings about radiation. I am about her age and it sounds like my diagnosis was not so different. I would not feel safe doing lumpectomy without radiation.

That said, when I was first reading about radiation, I did not feel this way. I was very nervous about it, and leery that the promised benefit was real enough to be worth while. I did a lot of research and got advice from doctors trusted by people I trusted. In the end, my conclusion was that radiation's benefits were well supported by the evidence for preventing both local recurrence and cancer-related death, that the long term risks were not as a high as I feared (given advancement in technology), and the short term risks were tolerable for me. One major factor for me that I had not predicted in advance was that, when push came to shove, it turned out to be important to me to keep my breast if I possibly could. That is not true for everybody.

You know her better than all of us. If you think that with research and time she might be more accepting of radiation, then it may be worth taking the time before deciding. If you think she is at her limit for processing new input on this, it seems to me that a mastectomy with no reconstruction makes sense - given her preference for the procedure that has the least health and lifestyle impact on her.

I think one of the most important factors here will be the relationship she has with her doctors, and whether she feels a sense of ownership and peace with her decision-making process.