@Mij That is a decision I faced early on & it is HARD! Do you play the odds, what are the statistics &percentages of getting a recurrence. It totally does your head in! I ended up taking the advice of my surgeon which was a lumpectomy. I had DCIS, stage 1 but aggressive. As I am small breasted, she decided that during the surgery, she was going to take tissue from below my breast to fill in my "gap" & then both would look the same & she did an amazing job. Talking to her before surgery gave me confidence that a lumpectomy was the right choice for me as a mastectomy was too massive. Like chopping off your leg when you have a sore toe!! I came out with clear margins & then it was my decision on whether to even have rad or not as the surgery was such a success. I decided to have rad only because my DCIS was aggressive. One thing as mentioned above by @Sister , is that you need to consider rad treatment in conjunction with mastectomy/recon. My rad onc didnt want to start rad treatment on me before i had my BRCA gene test done. If my gene test came back positive & then I decided I may want to have a mastectomy followed by recon, then rad treatment would make the recon very difficult as it effects the skin so much & certain recon doesn't work after rad. I was lucky as my test came back negative so my rad treatment went on as planned. If you have a family history of breast cancer then you may be eligible for the gene test so that may be something you want to consider doing first.
Some procedures need to be done in the correct order & i'm glad I found that out when I did. At the end, you do have to weigh up everything that your medical team says but the decision is yours & it is difficult. i decided to just deal with what I knew & not what may happen in the future but everyone is different. Good luck & let us know what you decide. Love & strength. xx
