Meeting with the Breast Surgeon

After the PET Scan, I had an appointment with Dr. Cronin, the breast surgeon both my plastic surgeon and oncologist recommended. I think she is the head of breast surgery at the hospital. Not a bad person to have on the team!

Before she came in the meet us, she went to see the radiologist who was scheduled to read my PET Scan as she wanted the preliminary results ASAP.  I already liked how this woman operates.  She was able to report that after three reads of the films, they see no evidence of the cancer spreading. Once we got that out of the way, we started talking about the surgery.  My implants from my prior mastectomy and reconstruction makes things a bit tricker.  Radiation can adversely affect them so it is possible the right one will need to be removed for a period of time (or probably possible forever).  Also, there are 2 spots that came up on the MRI but they could only find one on the ultrasound.  We obviously need to remove both, so she needs to figure out how to find it. At this point,  Dr. Cronin will consult with all the necessary doctors (plastic surgeon, radiation oncologist, radiologist, oncologist) to decide the best approach and let me know so we can schedule the surgery.  If we just need to remove the 2 spots, that would happen in the next 2 weeks and the surgery would be relatively easy. If the plastic surgeon somehow needs to be involved, it might take a little longer to get that scheduled and the recovery would take a bit longer.

For me, the next step is to see the radiation oncologist so she can examine me and help decide about the potential implant impact.  I guess on the PET Scan,  my implants look huge... As in Dolly Parton huge.  They are not that big in real life to Dr. Cronin wants the rad onc to make her decision after seeing me and not just my films. Hopefully we'll see her this week.

Dr Cronin had the final pathology from the biopsy, and the tumor appears to be HER2-, as expected which provides further evidence this is related to my original tumor and is once again very slow growing and not aggressive.  We'll have to wait for testing of all the tissue after surgery to confirm this assessment but that lends itself to no chemo.

(Oh and my post PET Scan "meal" consisted of a small salad, a bag of potato chips and 6 Oreos. I'm not proud but it tasted gooooooood!!!)