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What is considered expected follow-up?
Breast Cancer | Last Active: Apr 25 7:08pm | Replies (23)Comment receiving replies
Umm, I'm going to offer a different opinion than the above as I feel it's a bit aggressive. Early stage with no lymph involvement I wouldn't be concerned with any kind of mestasis. I did have a petscan and brain mri, but my initial biopsies showed cancer in the breast and the lymph node tested. You don't have lymph node involvement. Now I do disagree with some of the rest. My mammo technician told me that those patients with a cancer diagnosis usually have their oncologist order the diagnostic mammogram ( or whatever other term it might go by) for the first five years. If your oncologist is reluctant, it might be time to find a new one. Also, having osteopenia (as I do as well), you should probably have some kind of treatment for that as AI's are known for possible bone loss. I'm on Medicare, and it does not normally pay for bone building drugs for osteopenia; but with the AI treatment it does.
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My approach is best described as aggressive. While I'm always pleased to see alternate opinions because I am not certain of anything, I'm motivated by the occurance of breast cancer metastasized to the brain a neighbor, a renter and a relative. All of these women had breast cancer over 30 years earlier and were assured of the cureative effect of treatment.
Until I had cancer myself, I couldn't understand how these intelligent women hadn't had followup testing. Now I understand that the follow up is not encouraged expecially after five years. And is sometimes denied by medical providers. Most cancers don't end up directly in the brain and in these cases there were different stops along the way where cancers would have been detected. Undetected brain cancer is a painful madness. In all three women it was behaviour that alerted medical professionals to the cancers, too late.
Worse is the number of chemotherapeutic agents that enhance metastasis. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6616300/#:~:text=Chemotherapeutic%20drugs%2C%20cisplatin%2C%20paclitaxel%2C,6%2C%20and%20VEGF%2DA.
Now I'am beginning to understand that PET/CTs are uncommonly used before or after beast cancer.