The Circumstances in Your Favor

"Your doctor is likely to recommend chemotherapy and / or hormone therapy for you after surgery and exposure," says Susan Love, MD, head of the Faulkner Center for Breast Disease in Boston, and an adjunct professor, a clinical surgeon at Harvard Medical Institute. This is necessary for the reason that breast cancer is a systemic disease, it can spread throughout the body. Cancer cells penetrate into the blood vessels two to three years after the onset of primary tumor growth. A malignant neoplasm may appear in the mammary gland ten years before it is detected during examination. Some women are lucky in that their immune system identifies circulating cancer cells and kills them. The immune system of others is not in a position to do so.
Doctors do not know if the immune system of a particular patient will cope with cancer cells. Therefore, everyone, regardless of whether the tumor was only removed or a mastectomy was done, a course of chemotherapy is usually administered to women in the pre-menopausal period or hormone therapy, most of them to women in the postmenopausal period.
With the help of surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and hormone therapy, we are trying to reduce the total number of cancer cells so that your immune system can cope with the rest, Dr. Love says to her patients. In fact, your immune system is the main weapon in the fight against cancer. The treatment done by the doctors is just a helping hand. "
"After the diagnosis is established, consultations are usually held for a number of days and weeks with other specialists, information is collected and decisions made on treatment methods," says Mary Jane Massey, MD, a clinical psychiatrist at the Sloan-Kettering Memorial Cancer Center, which advises patients Breast cancer. The time between diagnosis and surgery is a very difficult time. You always think: "Do I make the right decision?" And "What consequences will my decision have?"
This is the time of such chilling fear that women are often afraid to trust the proposed treatment strategy. Kerry McGinn tells that at first she was so busy with consultations with specialists, finding out if there were other opinions, doing blood tests, undergoing a scan, a chest X-ray, that she did not have time to cry.
"I felt that I could not afford to relax and let the events develop themselves," she says, until I know exactly what I should do. "