cancer isn't killing me, I'm killing cancer!!!

The last week has been a bit difficult. It included a couple of days spent in ER for concerns that luckily turned out to be nothing. I have spent a lot of time in my head too, thinking about what has been happening to me and my feelings about the whole thing... it really hasn't been an easy week being me.

Today we finally got to see some light as I met with my surgeon to get the pathology results from my surgery. Basically they took all the stuff they cut out/off of me and tested it. Today the same surgeon who diagonsed me almost six months ago and on that day told me that he had never seen cancer grow that quickly, told me that he has never seen results like this from chemo. He said chemo will often shrink tumours like this considerably, but never has he seen it to this extent! So here are the results as I understood them. From the pathology of my breast they could tell that at one time the tumour had been greater than 8cm...they can tell that from the scar tissue. Now they could detect 0.5 mm (not cm but mm!!!) of non-evasive carcinoma (pretty much a dot of cancer cells that were just happy to be hanging out in my boob, not spreading or threatening). Next, I had 15 lymph nodes removed from under my arm and my chest. EVERY ONE of them was negative for carcinoma. They could tell that 4 had be cancerous at one time (scar tissue again) but now ZERO are cancerous. The surgeon said that it is likely that if there were cancer cells floating around elsewhere in my body they should have responded in the same way. Though there is no way to remove my sternum to do the same types of test on the cancerous spot there, it is likely that it has responded similarily. Radiation of my sternum will now be very important as if there are any cancerous cells hanging out in there still (even if they are non-evasive now I don't want them) radiation should be able to clean it all up. Obviously there are no guarantees and I still have a long road ahead of me, but there really couldn't have been any better results.

So how do I feel about all of this...to be honest it really hasn't sunk in at all. Lately I have been doing lots of reading and research about breast cancer and stage IV breast cancer. From everything that I have read/heard this type of cancer is not curable. While there have been a few cases where cure is still possible, for the most part treatment of the disease that I have is to prolong a persons life, not cure them. This is something that slowly I had come to accept, and while I still listened to all those people who told me that cure is still something of a possibility I tried to be realistic. Now, at least according to my surgeon, I have responded in such a way that maybe I can be one of those rare cases. I don't want to get ahead of myself, this is just one step of many, but at least now it doesn't seem like a complete fantasy. Today while seeing the surgeon he kept telling me "this is good news, this is good news", as I wasn't really responding as one might to such great news. I just told him that after a while you start to get used to hearing bad news and expect that it will always be that way, so maybe it will just take some time to sink in.