Good news!

Sorry to anyone who has anxiously awaited this post... we've been going non-stop since before 8am!

I'm going to try and sum up as best I can the wealth of information that was imputed into our brains today- most everything was fairly technical too, so I'll do my best to explain it in a way that makes sense. Here we go!

We received the final surgical pathology report from our oncologist Dr. Londer (he's great by the way:), and reviewed it in detail with him. Our prayers were answered again and final results confirmed the lymph nodes are cancer free and negative margins were achieved during the lumpectomy last Friday (this means the tissue removed from mom's breast has no cancer cells in the outer edges of the sample, so there should not be any remaining cancer cells left in her breast). To quantify things, mom has Stage 1A breast cancer: it's a small tumor (<0.5cm) and there is no metastasis (hasn't spread beyond the breast).

Other results: her tumor is estrogen and progesterone positive- meaning the hormones estrogen(ER) and progesterone(PR) are necessary for this type of cancer cell to grow and divide. This is a good thing! With ER/PR + cancers, hormone therapy is recommended (this type of therapy is considered 'systemic', which like chemotherapy would kill any straggling cancer cells anywhere in her body; where as radiation is a 'localized' treatment that only kills cancer cells in a specific area on the body). Since mom is post-menopausal, the medication Arimidex is our drug of choice- mom will be prescribed Arimidex and will take it once a day starting now, and continue to take it for 5 years (at least this is the recommendation based on current research). There are some potential minor side effects, for example hot flashes, fatigue, nausea and osteoporosis; so she is going in to have a baseline bone density scan next week; but if the side effects end up effecting her too much, there are other drugs on the market to try- this one just happens to be the most researched and has shown to prevent recurrence the best.

Other good news: the tumor cells are HER2 negative- HER2 is a protein and if the tumor cells have this it tends to be a more aggressive type of cancer, and harder to treat. Don't have to worry about that!

With all this information so far, Dr. Londer says that chemotherapy would not be necessary. This conclusion was reached using the 'Adjuvant Treatment plan' for breast cancer- it's a standard tool doctors use to determine how different treatments will benefit you- it's really complicated, so in general it shows that chemotherapy would not benefit mom. The only minor hesitancy here is that the cancer cells are 'grade III' (graded I-III). This means these cells are very different looking from healthy milk duct cells and tend to multiply at the fastest rate; the only negative so far in this journey. We learned there is one other test that can be done, called 'oncotype DX'. The really smart scientists of this company created a test that assesses 10 year breast cancer recurrence risk; it also sheds light into the benefit of certain types of chemotherapy. Mom, Dad & I decided we want to have this test done in order to better quantify the grade III cells and be more confident with the current treatment plan- we'll hear from our insurance company tomorrow if the test will be covered (it costs $3,500) and if it is we'll get results in a few weeks.

I'm sure by now I've thoroughly confused everyone! I'm going to stop here and recap: for now the plan is to 1) do radiation therapy that will start in about a month and last 4-7 weeks; and 2) start hormone therapy with Arimidex now. Potentially the oncotype DX test results could change this, but for now this is what our treatment plan is. We will meet with a Radiologist Oncologist in 2 weeks to discussed the details of radiation.

I'm beat, and heading to bed! Thanks again everyone, we'll be in touch soon!