Hi Stacey,
There will be time enough for you to enjoy yourself and spend some of the money you have saved.
Treatments have come a very long way and are constantly updated to give us the best possible outcome for our diagnosis.
I, too, was diagnosed with a lobular breast cancer in January this year. I had no symptoms, could not feel any lump or had any change in the appearance of my breast. The routine mammogram showed it as 2cm, the MRI as 3cm - and after the operation the pathlogy results came back and it was 11cm. As yet, I have not come across anyone, who had a cancer of that size on this site. Not that I am competitive with this, lol - but it shows that not all is lost, even if the growth is large.
Initially one may think - how can that be? - why did they not tell me straight away? - have they misdiagnosed?
Well, it is in the nature of the beast, so to speak. My particular one was a lobular in situ, which had changed into an invasive. Invasive in my case meant that the original 'lump' started to grow tentacles, so to speak - of which many are just a few cell strands wide. The MRI can not neccesarily pick this up and I also have quite dense breast tissue. And the grade changed, too. Grade 2 after biopsy and grade 3 after pathology, as the biopsy takes only a miniscule sample of one specific area.
Your actual treatment plan is usually put into place post operation and pathology results to ensure you get the right treatment for your specific diagnosis. Sometimes one may have chemo before surgery, but it does depend on your diagnosis following the biopsy. I do not think it is common to do a biopsy of a lymph node, even if swollen, if it is on the same side of the affected breast. When you have your operation they generally also do a sentinel node biopsy, which means they remove the first 'cluster' of lymph nodes on the affected side for testing.
I have had my operation, have just finished chemotherapy and still have to do the sessions of radiotherapy.
However - the most important thing is my future prognosis. When deciding on the treatment plan with my oncologist - taking my age (57), health status and pathology results into account - she shared this with me to make an informed decision about my adjucant treatment. She told me that it was not even worth talking about my 5 year prognosis, as it is more or less a given, that with my follow on treatment - I will still be here. My 10 year prognosis is a 12% chance that it may come back. Considering the size and that it must have been lurking for quite some time - that is simply amazing. I have beaten so many odds with all of this - I feel, I might just beat those odds, too.
Waiting for the biopsy results, so informed decisions can be made for the next step - as steps it is - can be very challenging. But once you have them - your treatment team has the next piece of the puzzle and can make informed decisions, together with you, as to the next steps. Should they decide to operate first, then the pathology results should add the final piece to that puzzle and the type of your adjuvant treatment will be based on those.
Hugs
Sue xxx
