Catia Bitching Cancer

Yesterday I saw my surgeon who explained what she had done and told me about the pathology report on my cancer. I had always wondered how much a breast weighs…mine weighed 335 grams (almost 12 ounces) on the pathologist scale. Not too shabby, eh? Anyway, as expected I had (notice the use of the past tense) multicentric disease (that is tumors located in multiple sites of my breast). The largest tumor was 2 cm. at its widest, there was no infiltration of the lympatic or vascular systems, thus it was a stage T1c (early stage). Yuppie! The bad news is that there were noninvasive carcinomas throughout (as we had suspected) and for one of them the surgeon could not excise as much healthy tissue around it as she would have liked (so the margin, as it is called, was only 1 mm. wide, where she would have preferred to have it at 1 cm.). Bottom line: the surgeon referred me to both a radiation oncologist and a medical oncologist, as she thought I’d need both radiation and chemo (plus hormone therapy, as my cancer tested positive to hormone receptors…another good thing). Francesca instead told me that the therapy in Europe would probably be limited to hormone therapy…so there is a good chance that I won’t need either chemo or radiation. If I have to do radiation it will mean that I will probably have to have another surgery to replace the implant, as it will likely be damaged by radiation…but I’ll wait to see what the oncologists say.

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