New to the Club
Hi, happy to find this group. I put off a mammo during Covid, then was dx June 1, 2021 with invasive lobular carcinoma. I was told at first it was caught early and I was stage one. I had a lumpectomy, chemo, radiation, then removal of lymph nodes. When I was done with treatment my doctor said in passing that I had been stage three. That was a bit of a shock. I was placed on Verzenio for two years and tamoxifen for 10 years. I’ve had three years of scans that show no sign of disease. I asked my doctor if I’m cancer free and she said no, because it’s in my lymph nodes, and her job is to keep it from growing and spreading. That’s unsettling, and yearly scanxiety is real. However, I’m so grateful to be here.
Welcome, CH6121! First of all, I hope you are not hard on yourself for putting off your mammogram during Covid. It was an impossible time! For a while they were telling us not to do non-urgent medical visits, and then we all had so many real challenges to face that a hypothetical challenge like breast cancer was going to be lower down the list of things to address. A lot of people did the same thing you did. I saw that screening mammograms dropped by 44% during Covid.
I had invasive lobular carcinoma too. We're a little club within a club! I'm sorry that your doctor was so casual about your new staging. That's kind of a double whammy: news you don't want, delivered unartfully. It is unfortunately very common for them to find more ILC than they'd originally thought because of its growth pattern and the difficulty in seeing it on imaging. We are special. 😉
Congratulations on your three disease-free years, and I hope you are doing well on your Tamoxifen! I also get very anxious before a scan. It begins as soon as I have the date in my calendar. I don't know if that feeling will ever go away, but I'm learning to manage it.
Glad you're here!