Hi there @Alex82...sorry you've had to join the club that nobody wants to join. I was diagnosed in September 2016 with Stage 3 Grade 3, Triple Positive, multifocal and with node involvement on the left, and so called abnormal geography on the right. When I was told that I should have neoadjuvant (before surgery) chemo, then bilateral mastectomy, I too was as worried as hell. I had all these thoughts of the biopsies having stirred up the pot, by poking into them, and had visions of cancer running rampant while they delayed surgery. As a public patient, I have to admit that I thought that the surgery lists were long, and that they were just going to do the chemo first, as a sort of holding pattern. Like air traffic controllers, they were going to keep me busy circling the airport at altitude, until a runway (operating theatre) became vacant. Then my breast care nurse explained to me that particularly as I was triple positive, my cancer was very aggressive and that if just one feral cancer cell had jumped ship from the breast, and had gone walkabout elsewhere, and then set up comfortably, that would be a big problem that removing the breast(s) wouldn't solve. The chemo before surgery would sort out any cancer that might have already spread, but that was too small to show on any of the scans I'd already had. It would also shrink the tumours and when the surgery happened, the pathology would show how effective the chemo had been, and if more was needed. I had 4 X AC chemo, followed by 12 X paclitaxel and Herceptin for just under a year. I had my bilateral mastectomy mid 2017 and the pathology report stated that there were no live cancer cells found in either the removed breasts or the nodes....only the "empty tumour beds" were found. So a 100% pathological response. i'm now on letrozole and will be for at least ten years. Still NED (no evidence of disease).
