@derry1 Oh lovely, I’m so sorry. 
I can completely understand why you feel utterly floored by this. You went into surgery thinking you were dealing with two small, grade 2 tumours with nodes that didn’t look suspicious, and instead you’ve been handed a completely different picture. That is an enormous amount to process in one go.
Please don’t be angry with yourself for letting yourself relax a little. You had every reason to believe the information you’d been given. You weren’t being stupid or naive — you were trying to get through something frightening and allowing yourself to believe that perhaps the worst of it was behind you. None of us can prepare ourselves for information we simply didn’t have.
It may also help to know that it’s actually quite common for the diagnosis and staging information to change after surgery and positive lymph nodes do not mean a definite diagnosis of secondary breast cancer .
I know many women who have had lymph node involvement and they are still here, it hadn’t spread
Biopsies and scans can only give the doctors a picture of what they can see and sample before surgery. The pathology from the whole tumour and the lymph nodes gives them much more information, and sometimes the size, grade, lymph node involvement or other characteristics turn out to be different from what was initially thought. It doesn’t mean you did anything wrong, or that you somehow should have known.
My own diagnosis started as multifocal DCIS with a tiny 1mm grade 2 invasive tumour and I was told after initial assessments that I was unlikely to need chemotherapy.
But after my mastectomy, the results were different , it came back as multifocal high grade DCIS with five separate HER2 positive tumours, and suddenly there was no question at all: I absolutely needed chemotherapy, along with a much more intensive treatment plan than anyone had expected. It was a huge emotional whiplash, going from thinking I might avoid chemo entirely to being told it was essential, I did cry like a baby because I’m an absolute wimp and the worst patient ever !
I was terrified at the prospect of chemo and targeted therapy
I remember feeling terrified , just like you’re experiencing now but .. I finished all my treatment a year ago, and I’m still here.
And please try not to let your mind jump to thinking “ this is going to be a terrible outcome “
I know that fear is incredibly powerful, but you don’t have that information. Even when things turn out to be more extensive than expected, that does not automatically mean a poor outcome or a shortened future.
Right now you are grieving the future you thought you were going to have after surgery, and you’re terrified because that future has suddenly been taken away from you.
Let your family look after you. Cry, be angry, be frightened. Get through this one appointment, one treatment and one day at a time.
And please remember that your pathology results are not the same thing as a prognosis. There is still a lot of information to come, including the full treatment plan.
For me , while everything was still in the planning treatment stage , I felt stressed and anxious, but as soon as I as treatment began .. It felt better knowing that things were happening
Your children need you, and right now your job isn’t to figure out how you’re going to live without them… I remember feeling the same at the time, I wrote myself off without knowing the facts
let your HC team work out how best to treat you and to get through the next step.
Sending you so much love. Please be very gentle with yourself xx
Please do contact the breast cancer now nurses if you really need to speak to someone. Xx
Arty1
