Hi Joleen, I did respond to your other thread, but can see that you are really worried about this, and I don't blame you. The thing to hang on to is that just because certain conditions have typical presentations, ie fibroadenomas are round and moveable, cancers are hard and spiky, cysts are soft and squishy - everyone, and therefore everyones body is individual and it follows that what the cells in their body do will be relatively indvidual too. So, not everyones cyst, fibro, cancer will look the same, or present in the same way as everyone elses.
When the pathologist looked at your biopsy, he/she saw cells that are typically found in fibroadenomas - if nothing else was found they have to conclude that they found a fibroadenoma. Because this finding didn't correlate with the surgeons clinical exam, or the imaging, they have to investigat further. Normally a triple assessment of clinical exam, imaging and biopsy will have all three investigations concur and can be considered 99% accurate for diagnosis. If the findings fail to agree, surgical excision is the next step - anyhting that is removed from the body will be sent to pathology ( even excess breast tissue from a reduction is sent to pathology). This gives the pathologist a larger specimen to investigate -usually what is called a frozen section is made during or soon after the operation, which will give a preliminary but pretty accurate result - after the remaining tissue is sent to the lab and various processes are applied which further characterise it in a very very through manner. If your funky fibroadenoma is anything else, they will be able to tell you.
I did a little check of the research, on rare occasions malignancy can be found within a fibradenoma - this isnt suspected on imaging because it is normally found inside the firbroadenoma. Fibros consist of over excited and prolific breast cells - it's breat tissue gone mad, therefore anything that can happen to normal breast tissue ( like cysts, fat necrosis, cancer etc) can also happen to a fibroadenoma - but this is an unusual finding.
Bethy is right, you do have a fantastic surgeon who is being very proactive and thorough - and though none of this will help much with the anxiety of waiting for a definitive diagnosis take heart that your worries are being adressed by a good doctor. That's worth its weight in gold at this time as Bethy's story shows.
I sincerely hope they get this out, it is just a bit of over excited breast tissue that is a bit on the showy side and that your surgeon wants to write a paper on it because it's an unusual presentation worthy of a mention in the literature. If it isn't, we are all here for you. Take care.
