Good news!

Today we got good news! Dr. B. called me and said that of my 4 lymph nodes they biopsied, they ALL came back negative. That means the cancer has not spread! And I don’t have to get bumped to stage 2! And they won’t have to take any more lymph nodes next week during my mastectomy! And I won’t have to get radiation! I am the happiest cancer patient (make that STAGE 1 cancer patient!) you have ever seen right now. :) I am actually looking FORWARD to my big surgery on Wednesday so I can continue the fight and get the rest of these bad cells out of me.

I’m including an illustration so you can see what this means. I know some of you are learning about all of this right along with me, so I thought this would help. Dr. B. took the sentinel (which means “first”) lymph node that was closest to my tumor, along with the 3 others closest to it. There is a whole network of lymph nodes in the breast/armpit area, but the ones he was concerned with were the ones closest to the tumor, because that’s where the cancer cells would have traveled to first, before spreading to other parts of the body. Since they came back clear, that means the ones farther away are clear too, so he doesn’t have to test those. However, I will still need to get chemo, because if one stray cancer cell escaped, it could have traveled through my blood stream, right through the lymph nodes, and ended up somewhere else. So the drugs I receive through chemo will attempt to knock out any stragglers so they won’t come back and haunt me later. But other than any random stray cells, the cancer has not metastasized to the lymph nodes or anywhere else.

My brother told me today that his friend has just scheduled her first mammogram because of my blog. It literally makes me tear up right now to think that someone could avoid all of this, I am SO happy. I know my sister has already scheduled hers too. THANK you all for listening to me. And a friend just told me she made her first donation to Susan G. Komen – you all are amazing! I wish I had acted sooner – I have known for a long time that I had a family history of breast cancer as well as other types of cancer, but I didn’t do anything about it. I wish I had gotten the gene test sooner, so I could have been followed more carefully by doctors. And I wish I had gotten mammograms sooner. But it looks like some good is going to come out of this. And hopefully when you all get your mammograms, you will get GOOD news too!