Pathology is in and finally some long awaited answers to some hard questions!

The doctor called tonight and started off by saying he had a lot of good news for me.  He also had some answers to some questions I had. 

For starters he explained the statement the radiologist said. The way he put it, generally when they remove the amount of tissue they had to remove from me, they would indeed have to do a mastectomy. He explained further that if he was removing that amount of tissue from someone who had an “a” or “b” cup, it would have been a mastectomy. Then he literally chuckled and said, “You have large breasts so it’s a lot easier to remove a large amount of tissue without having to take the entire breast.” Well now, that made sense.

He then told me that the tumor was 2 millimeters invasive, pretty small, but the  mass of cancerous calcifications was large and he was aggressive in removing it. He said the four inch incision worked better for his purposes and that he was confident the scarring would be minimal. 

He said the area he removed had been tested around the edges – no sign of cancer on the borders. He said one lymph node was completely clean. No cancer. The second lymph node was not completely clean but because it contained so few cancer cells, they still considered it negative. 

Though he could not be 100% positive, he believed the medical oncologist would not recommend chemo, though he did say it was still possible they may want to send the tissue itself for genetic testing. So that I will learn more about in a couple of weeks. 

I obviously will still have to have radiation, but will need to heal up first and find out what’s happening with chemo (which honestly even if they recommend it, there’s slim to no chance I would do it. So not a big time consumer on that one). 

He told me to make an appointment to come see him next week and then they will get me set up with the medical oncologist. 

He mentioned several times during the conversation that he was aggressive, that I would be sore and swollen for a while. When I first had met with him, he said it wouldn’t be that much of a recovery, so this also was something that had changed.

I finally got up the nerve and asked him just how much tissue did he remove?

I’m still extremely swollen so from what I can tell, that breast looks to still be larger than the right, and it always was anyway, so it didn’t appear that much had been removed but with the swelling it’s hard to judge.

His answer would have knocked me over if I had been standing.

“The size of an orange,” he said. “And not one of those little cuties. A full size orange.”

Damn.

He then said he did “A lot of work in there.” He rearranged the rest of my breast tissue to even everything out so that I wasn’t left with a crater.  I’m still pretty shocked.  I’m glad he did it the way he did, but I’m going to be surprised about that one for a while.

So next week I get to start in with more doctor appointments, but surgery is behind me.