Welcome to Cancer Chat Marjan.

I'm so sorry to read what happened when you got home after finding out about your mother's diagnosis. I can't begin to imagine how that must have felt.

Any medical questions you have are best answered by your mum's medical team but our cancer nurses are available for a chat on 0808 800 4040, Monday - Friday between 9a.m - 5p.m if you'd like to discuss this with them as well.

Hopefully some of our members who are or have been in a similar situation to your mother will be offering their support and advice soon but I just want you to know that we're here for you and our community will do what they can to help.

Kind regards and best wishes to you all, 

Steph, Cancer Chat Moderator

Thank you so much for your kind words. It really was hideous to come home to a ransacked home after the diagnosis. The injustice of it all shocked us and how little our neighbours were willing to help us was astounding. One neighbour walked away after telling me it was probably bailiffs... at the time it was all so non-sensical. The police are involved now.

Honestly... regarding the CT scan, I am worried that the cancer has spread to other parts of her body. They have also now found a microcalcification in her right breast and are testing to see whether these cells are cancerous too. It's such a worrying time. Is anyone else waiting to have a whole body CT scan? How has this period been for you?

The consultant surgeon has told us that mum has a stage 3 tumour in her left breast and stage 0/1 cancerous cells/calcifications in her right breasts. The CT scan of her upper body and the whole body bone scan indicate no metastatic spread beyond her lymph nodes. Mum will have a bilateral mastectomy and node clearance on her left hand side and a sample of nodes on her right hand side will be taken and checked to see whether node clearance is required on the right side. 

The surgeon also told us that chemotherapy may not also be required. It's really good news considering my fears that it had spread all over the body.

To all others waiting for results, I wish you all the best.

Follow-up: Last week, my mother had a double mastectomy with a left lymph node clearance and a sentinel node dissection (right side). She had her drains removed today and the consultant told my mother that everything is healing well. Mum has experienced minimal pain since the operation, taking paracetamol and codeine for the first few days only.

Mum has no sign of cancerous tissue following the mastectomy. The sentinel node dissection found evidence of micrometastases in one node and mum will have radiation therapy on her right side to treat this. They are still analysing my mother's tissue samples further to check whether she will require chemotherapy. It's possible that the additional benefit it would provide is so small that it won't be worth the side effects. She will need to have hormone therapy for the next 10 years. In all, although the week with the drains after her mastectomy was uncomfortable (the drains would get quite heavy and mum used an apron to carry them in the pouch at the front and secured the tubes with small hair claws), she has found it relatively easy to recover from physically and she is in good spirits.