Macrometastasis and Age at Diagnosis

Hi,

I'm a new poster here. I've been lurking for almost 2 years now and have garnered a wealth of information from many of you that has helped me in my own cancer journey. Thank you! I have a few questions, but they require a brief story first to explain the situation.

I noticed a somewhat-large lump that suddenly appeared in April 2020. At approximately the same time, a group of individuals started a harassment campaign against me. (They contacted my childhood abuser, fed him sensitive information about me, and refused to stop.) I was so distressed over the harassment that I ended up postponing a trip to the doctor to get the lump checked out. I had no family history of cancer. By the time I went to the doctor and got a mammo, it was 2 years later (June 2022). I was diagnosed with both IDC and DCIS (ER/PR+, HER2-). Because of the delay in diagnosis, the primary tumor (1.3 cm, grade 2) had migrated to another location in the breast, so there were actually 3 lumps. I underwent a single mastectomy with SLNB. They took out 4 lymph nodes, and found cancer in one of them.

My first question relates to the positive lymph node. It came back as 5mm in size. According to what I have read, that qualifies it as "macrometastasis" (anything over 2mm). But there doesn't seem to be a lot of research out there about the significance of the size of positive lymph nodes. Obviously, the 2-year delay caused this thing to really grow! How significant is this when determining future prognosis? Has anyone else here had macrometastatis, and if so, how large was/were your lymph node(s) and have you had a recurrence?

My next question relates to my age at diagnosis. When running calculations through online recurrence predictors, they want to know if I was 40-49, or 50-59. When I initially found the lump, I was 49. The group of people harassing me put me under so much stress and strain, that I simply couldn't function, much less properly monitor my health. (I would lie in bed at night wondering if death would be better...) By the time I got the cancer diagnosed, I was 51. It seems crazy to say I was diagnosed at 51, when the cancer was obviously there two years prior. Does it make that much of a difference in prognosis?