Medical update - just the nerdy facts

We met with our breast surgeon, Dr. Wilke, today at UW Hospital Breast Center, and the treatment picture is now much clearer to us.

Dr. Wilke is recommending that Becca do chemotherapy first, and then do surgery. This is a protocol that has been developed and tested over the last few years, and has been found to have at least as good outcomes as doing the treatments in the other order (which was the standard previously). It allows treatment to start immediately, while we wait for the genetic testing results which will inform which surgical protocol we choose. It also allows the doctors to evaluate the effectiveness of the chemotherapy from pathology results after surgery - if the chemotherapy is completely effective, the pathology results may not find any cancer in the tissue removed. She said that it is not unusual for fast growing tumors to completely disappear before surgery - and, if we choose a lumpectomy, which only removes tissue around the tumor, they would use the markers placed during biopsy to guide the surgeon.

We will see the medical oncologist, who will give us more details on the chemotherapy, on Thursday; but we learned today that it is called neoadjuvant therapy, and the likely agents will be ACT therapy.  Dr. O'Regan, who will be our medical oncologist, just came to Madison from Atlanta to lead the medical oncology group in the breast clinic, from Emory where she was leading the Hematology and Medical Oncology department. Dr. O'Regan also will give us information about any medical trials, here or elsewhere, that we might be eligible for.

We expect the chemotherapy protocol to begin in a week or two, and involve treatments every 2-3 weeks for 4-6 months (because of Becca's age and good health, she'll likely have treatments every two weeks). Dr. Wilke told us to expect 2-3 days of feeling lousy after the day of chemotherapy in each cycle. 

After the chemo is done, we'd get a month off to recover before surgery.

We also received our MRI results today. The MRI found a couple additional regions of concern, so Becca had an ultrasound biopsy today, and two MRI guided biopsies are scheduled for Friday - so send her your healing thoughts.

--Don