We went in the week after that PET scan to see my oncologist and for my 4th scheduled chemo treatment...when he came in he reiterated the results and was equally as flabbergasted with how well I was doing as my GP was...he examined me and said we'd do 2 more treatments, then do an echo to check my heart after the 5th and then make a determination if we'd do 1 or 2 more. Some of the meds I was on could damage my heart and one of them you can only take so many times in your life, so he wanted to make sure my body was holding up but do as much as we could with this cocktail since it was obviously working so well. After that we'd do 'maintenance chemo' that he said would be much more mild to my system. We were so pleased and I think it was kinda strange for the doc to see me in such a great mood. I asked him when we would do the mastectomy and to my shock he said he wouldn't recommend it...I didn't get it cuz I thought that was what we were working for this whole time. He said with stage IV cancer that it wouldn't be necessary if my last PET was clean. I still didn't understand what he meant but went on to do my 4th treatment and knew I'd call my GP later for an explanation and see if he agreed. Later that night I spoke with my GP and he explained it so much better....the theory was that there was no tumor and if my PET was completely clean at this point there would be no need for the mastectomy and he agreed with that line of thought. I was still confused cuz I thought that a double mastectomy still would cut down on the chance of recurrence, but he said that wasn't true anymore. If it had stayed only in my breast then, yes, it would be a precautionary measure he'd recommend but since it had gotten outside my breast that it made as much sense to lop of my boobs as it did to remove my nodes, liver, or bones...it had an equal chance of coming back anywhere in my body in the future and that targeting only my breasts for removal wouldn't bring down those chances significantly enuff to warrant it. Okay, I get it...scary sounding when we start talking about recurrence, but I understood what he was saying. I had to wrap my mind around the thought that there would be no mastectomy and that was kinda weird considering I had been looking to that as kinda an end point to this nightmare. We were still going to have to discuss the concept of reconstruction cuz my left breast was mangled and about half the size of my right one, but that was something we hadn't gotten to the point to need to decide about it yet.
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