Hello everybody,

Sorry for the long post - I have joined this chat to mainly off load about my poor old mum and maybye/hopefully seek some reassurance, to say I'm worried about her is an uderstatement.  It all started with a routine mammagram several months ago, it was picked up that she had a large area of DCIS in her right breast which required a mastectomy.  She had her mastectomy in August this year, it was a long surgery as she also had an implant put in.  It takes my mum a long time to recover from general anaesthetic and it completely wipes out her appitite, so much so that she's lost loads of weight and is quite frail, she is 66 years old.  The results of her removed breast came back with two tiny tumours which are HER2 Positive, a very, very small bit of which was found in her Sentinal node, but not in the other lymph nodes they took out during the operation - she has been informed this type of cancer is only treatable with chemo and herceptin.  The oncologist refered her for an MRI & CT Scan just to see if it had spread (she had an adverse reaction to the stuff they use during the CT scan), however the scans also found something wrong with her right kidney.  The oncologist referred to see a Urologist which has confirmed that it looks likely it is Kidney Cancer, but is almost likely to be un-related to the Breast Cancer.  It looks like she will have to have her kidney removed, but it looks like it is in early stage as she didn't have any signs and symptoms.  The removal of her kidney will obviously delay the treatment for her HER2 Positive cancer.  I am holding onto 2 silver linings on 2 very dark clouds at the moment, one is that if she hadn't had the scans relating to her breast cancer then they would never have found the kidney cancer until it is too late, the other is that the Breast Oncologist said that it wasn't a 'Death Sentence'.  Sorry for the long post, just wanted to vent.

One thing I'd like to ask this forum is - would the Oncologist say 'it's not a death sentence' if they didn't mean it in order to give my mum some hope for the future?

Thanks for reading xx