Hi @Nattyv63 I just wanted to let you know that often surgery is the last, not the first step in treatment. I had chemo, then radiotherapy, then surgery. This was because the tumour was large and close to the skin, so they wanted to shrink it down as much as possible before performing a mastectomy. This worked really well and I had a Diep flap reconstruction with minimal scarring (of the breast anyway) as they were able to save all the breast skin apart from the nipple. The scar is barely visible now and it's just a circle where the nipple and areola used to be (they put the transplanted tissue in through that hole then used skin from my tummy to replace the nipple/areola).
