Breast cancer-free anniversaries

Ty !

I started this little thread at a time when I felt that I was drowning in Cancerworld with its all new vocabulary and all the reading I was doing to try to understand the concepts and the vocabulary.

I am very grateful to everyone who is posted here and I'm sure that many other people are encouraged by the comments. It's amazing to me to read that someone had breast cancer 58 years ago and has not had a recurrence. I'm pretty familiar with the statistics for breast cancer but so much of the focus is on recurrence, which is important to pay attention to because it's a reality, that I think it's easy to forget that the statistics favor non-recurrence in most cases.

In any event I hope people celebrate any little step or big step along the way that gives them comfort because they're all important. I just had the routine mammogram ultrasound and visit with the oncologist for the 18-month milestone since a lumpectomy and all seems to be well.

I wanted to make one point about tumor markers. Mine have come down significantly and I mentioned that to my oncologist is good news. I like his answer and hope that will reassure other people. His answer was that he agrees that it's better that they come down then not but he doesn't like to give too much weight to tumor markers because people can worry about them when they go up for some totally non cancer related reason. So he sees them as a data point but nothing to give too much thought to in either direction.

His rule of thumb for tumor markers is to pay attention if each test result is higher than the previous test result, if any test result is 50% higher than the previous one, if the trend line is upward sloping. In the event of any of those three factors he would consider further testing to see if anything else is going on that might not have been detected by the mammogram or ultrasound. But only in those cases. But it's also true that tumor markers going down is never a bad sign because it suggests that some inflammation somewhere in the body is being dealt with by the immune system.

Thank you again to those sharing whatever anniversaries they choose to find significant in this unintended journey through cancer.

Very nice explanation. I enjoyed reafing that. Something else for us to filenaway.

My doc has never done tumor markers.

Very helpful @anjalima regarding MRI insistence given dense breasts. I'm 6 month out from diagnosis (ILC- lumpectomry- very dense breasts) and my oncologist said that scans before 1 year are not helpful! I am now going to call her back as so many of you have recommended MRI for lobular and dense breasts. I'm so glad you are being followed every 6 months!!

BRAVA! 💕🌸💕

I forgot to add, for those people worried about seromas, that the one I had is almost completely gone now. It seemed to remain nearly the same size for a year but then healed at a fast clip in the subsequent six months.

I've made a few dietary and other lifestyle changes but nothing particularly significant so maybe that's just the way seromas heal at an apparently irregular rate? The breast cancer surgeon that I saw for post-surgery follow-up did say that sometimes they take a long time to go away and in some cases don't even form in the first place.