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Breast Surgery; any advice to prepare for surgery?

Breast Cancer | Last Active: Jun 7 10:04am | Replies (21)
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@jcolby

Don't understand your biopsy results, but as for preparing for surgery be in good health and be prayerful. My surgeon at Mayo held me and prayed for me before surgery. It really put me in a peaceful place. A grade one tumor is the least cancerous and usually slow growing. That's good. I'm assuming the tumor is large since you are on anastrozole?? Did they biopsy your lymph nodes? Will they do an Oncotype dx test? Wishing you an easy recovery.

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Replies to "Don't understand your biopsy results, but as for preparing for surgery be in good health and..."
Laurie, Volunteer Mentor | @roch | Jun 28, 2018

Thanks for your response. I was not familiar with Oncotype DX so looked it up.

For others reading, this is definition I found:
The Oncotype DX is used in two ways: to help doctors figure out a woman's risk of early-stage, estrogen-receptor-positive breast cancer coming back (recurrence), as well as how likely she is to benefit from chemotherapy after breast cancer surgery.

My interpretation of what I read is that is uses ER, PR, HER2, and Ki-67 measures. I have had all those done.

They will be using a modified PEPI score at surgery time to determine need for chemo. Here is definition of PEPI I found:
The PEPI tool predicts the risk of breast cancer coming back in women who got hormonal therapy before surgery by looking at four breast cancer characteristics:
tumor size
whether cancer cells are in nearby lymph nodes
hormone receptor status of the cancer
Ki67 blood levels (Ki67 levels are linked to a cancer's tendency to grow and spread; doctors call Ki67 a tumor cell proliferation marker)

So many terms and acronyms to keep track of !

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