Hi Anna of BCC,
Thanks for your comments re. why you have locked my earlier post, regarding residual (recurrent) disease after a MX. And for the forum policy guidelines.
I will repost my question but without the ‘incentive’, now. (I know, that so many of us, who use the forum, are busy mums and/or working-women etc. and do have to ‘read and run’ on occasion! So it was a way around that behaviour.)
Across your site, other BC sites and contacts of contacts; I am getting great feedback to my propsition: that if you have a mastectomy, particularly a skin-sparing- mastectomy, across most hospitals in the UK then you are not currently likely to be offered, robust, post-op, testing of ALL your tissue margins. Certainly, not as throrough a review, that you would receive, if you had, had a WLE (lumpectomy). This will leave women , thankfully not many, but a reasonable number at a greater risk of having residual or microscopic disease missed or of developing at a later date; recurrence and even possible further progression of their disease, as a worst case scenario. But I am very open to challenge on my proposition? I could be missing something very obvious…I have been told that Margin Testing after MX isn’t needed, as all the live breast tissue is removed - but to counter that a lightening-fast web review, between, other Sunday chores here, tells me that everyone knows and states openly, that scenario is not, even with the best surgeon, on your team, quite possible - especially, at your skin side.
I would love to think what really amounts to a “lack of thorough checking” that we are clear of disease- from some (most) of the hospital’s involved in all our treatments; rather than from by the women themselves who usually pick up residual/remaining disease could be reviewed and hopefully changed to improve women who have been through a MX health outcomes going forwards.
After all the same women who are told by the hospitals and all the ‘thought-leaders’ in the Breast Cancer area to “check, check, check” probably expect nothing less is happening within the teams, we all entrust are care and treatment to. I certainly did.