Meeting the Surgeon, Dr. Khan - Experience #7

Sorry that I didn't post this last night, but we got home at about 8:00 or so (after a big dinner at my favorite rib place downtown) and promptly fell asleep.

The visit went well and I have a date for surgery, Tuesday July 17. The Lynn Sage Breast Center at Northwestern is a very impressive place and we both liked the doctor assigned to me, Seema Khan, a lot. Her research is in breast cancer risk and prevention. She explained my case to us in detail and very well. We both thought we had a pretty good understanding of DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ) going in from all the reading we had done, but we both felt that we gained valuable additional information in talking with Dr. Kahn. For example, it is a very good sign that my calcifications are small, but until they do the surgery they won't know what the extent of the cancer is for sure. The calcifications are a kind of guide, but the cancer can be larger, going beyond the area of the calcifications. Still, it is good that they are small.

The prognosis looks very good, but the doctor explained that with this particular kind of cancer you really can't know for sure whether it's invasive or not until after the pathology comes back after surgery. That will happen on Friday July 20. I have intermediate grade cells, which are not bad -- chances are that such cells would not be invasive at this point.

The surgery will be short, about an hour total time in the room. The idea is to get the cancer out and to establish a "free margin," a border of healthy cells. We'll be arriving at the hospital at 8:30am and hope to be home in the early afternoon or so. I will be having radiation, but that doesn't start until a month or so after surgery, and will run every day for about six weeks. With radiation I have only a 5-10% chance of recurrence. As a poker player I'd say those are odds definitely worth taking.

My receptors are estrogen positive, which is good news in the sense that it means that I am likely to respond to a drug called Tamoxifen which I am probably going to be on be for the next five years. If effective, tamoxifen will probably also foster hot flashes, given that it is designed to alter the level of estrogen in my body.

That's all for now. Thanks to everyone for their support and good thoughts from a distance. It means a lot to us!