Bilateral IDC, anyone?

While many of us have had bilateral BC, there aren’t many who have it at the same time. In some ways it seems like you can get the surgery/treatment over with pretty efficiently. If your cancers are different types, your treatment will be based on the more aggressive one. I agree about genetic testing, although if it were me, I wouldn’t let it delay surgery. I was committed to lumpectomies and didn’t have genetic testing until after I was finished with treatment. The only reasons I did it were I would have gotten more frequent monitoring if there had been positive results, and it might have led to a hysterectomy. (Mine came out negative.)

I was diagnosed with bilateral IDC on August 29th 2016. Right side was triple negative, with just one largish tumor, but left side was ER/PR positive with five distinct foci. I also had dcis and lcis and ILC thrown in for good measure. A little of everything. Or as my BS put it: I win (or lose!) at cancer bingo.

My most pressing issue was the triple negative, so they treated that first with 5 months of neoadjuvant chemo (ACT), then bilateral mastectomy, then five more months of chemo, this time Xeloda.

I chose not to do radiation. I smoked for 40 years and have damaged my lungs and my heart enough. My MO understood.

It was a rough two plus years. I'm finally starting to feel a little more like myself again. With the exception of chemo brain. That's better, but not completely okay. I'm hoping it will continue to improve.

Best wishes for easy treatments and great response.

Trish

I think my story might be helpful. I had DBL Breast Cancer different kinds diagnosed. If you read my stats. Originally I was planning on a lumpectomy as my left breast had a tiny tumor Her+ . They told me to plan on Chemo. So then I told them to go back and look at the right Breast DCIS and they biopsied it. There was too much DCIS in my right breast to save it so at that point I chose a DBL Mastectomy ( not ideal and not my first choice . If I could have I would have chosen a dbl lumpectomy but since chem was a given I could at least avoid radiation.

Two week later my results came back for BRCA and they were negative but 2-3 weeks after my DBL mastectomy I came back Palb2 positive which atleast made me feel better about the treatment path I chose.

I still wish I had just been a candidate for Dbl lumpectomy and radiation - no chemo. Especially if the cancer was small, nodes were negative and no Gene.