It’s amazing how quickly you become an expert while you are waiting for your treatment plan!
- Invasive Ductal Breast Cancer: 1.1cm Tumor
- Histologic Grade: 3
- Hormone Receptor Status: Triple Negative (TNBC)
- Proliferation Rate (Ki-67): Low
- Stage: TBD
- Lymph Nodes: 3 suspicious
- Genetic: BRCA 1: Negative, BRCA 2: Inconclusive
- Age at Diagnosis: 36
- Family: No history of BC
Staging – What I’ve learned about my diagnosis – for having babies, I’m old but for breast cancer I’m young, which is technically bad, and triple negative is a particularly aggressive cancer with high likelihood of coming back. We are hopeful that my lymph nodes are reacting to my biopsy, and if that is the case, I’m only a stage I. If it’s present in the 3 lymph notes it would be a stage 2. And hopefully it hasn’t spread. We will have a PET-CT Scan to confirm as such in the next few weeks.
Markers – For those who are curious Triple negative refers to some “markers” they look for. Does the cancer respond to hormones (like estrogen) or proteins HER2. These are help as there are some good targeted therapies for these markets, but triple negative does not respond to any of these.
Aggressiveness – Last the “aggressiveness” there are two types of attributes we look at for aggressiveness – the Grade (0 to 3, 3 being most aggressive) and Ki-67 (0 to 100, 100 being most aggressive). I have conflicting attributes, a Grade 3 with low Ki-67.
Genetics – they would like to request testing to help understand why I have this so young, but the results won’t change my treatment plan. It will be helpful for family, and they may look for ovarian cancer markers as well. (see genetics results here).