Couldn’t do biopsy. Now what?

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Wxnerd
Wxnerd Member Posts: 7
edited August 2019 in Not Diagnosed But Worried

I was supposed to have a stereotactic biopsy this morning but the tech said they couldn’t do it because my breast didn’t go far enough down to where the camera could reach the area to be biopsied. She said I will need to have a surgical biopsy done. What can I expect for that? Will they just take out a few calcifications or will they try to remove all of them since I will be cut open? What’s the recovery time kike

I’m really angry about this right now. I’ve been waiting almost 3 months to get answers and now I have to wait even longer.

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  • djmammo
    djmammo Member Posts: 2,939
    edited August 2019

    This is not uncommon. There are basically two companies that make these machines. One had s needle oriented parallel to the chest wall, the other has a needle that is angled upwards. The second type has a better chance of sampling posterior calcifications than the first but no system is perfect and not all radiologists know all the tricks for sampling hard to reach calcs.

    If there is anything on your US that can be associated with those calcs they can biopsy them that way. If they can be seen on Mammo (I assume they can) a marker can be placed in your breast in the Rad dept right before the surgery that will allow the surgeon to find them as they are not palpable. The standard procedure is placing a flexible wire in the breast adjacent to the calcs while you are in the mammo machine and this is still done in most departments. A new system allows a small harmless radiation source to be placed in the breast up to a few days before surgery that can be found with a detector during surgery, I believe this is still less common in smaller communities.

    See this reference regarding localizations: http://www.carolmilgardbreastcenter.org/wire-localization

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