Breast Cancer : In Depth - Understanding Your Diag...
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If you're having symptoms of breast cancer or have something suspicious that has shown up on a previous test, your doctor will want to follow up. Your doctor is likely to ask you questions concerning these things:
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Your yearly checkup should include a clinical breast exam. This exam may be done by a gynecologist, family doctor, nurse practitioner, or specially trained nurse. Yearly breast exams help to ensure that breast conditions are found early.
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Schedule the test for one week after your period, when your breasts are less tender. Make sure your clinic gets your last mammogram if it was done somewhere else. This lets the doctor compare the two.
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During a biopsy, a doctor removes cells from your breast and then sends them to a lab to be examined under a microscope. There is more than one kind of biopsy. The type that your doctor suggests depends on what has been learned thus far about the lump and whether or not it can be located by touch alone. Here are brief descriptions of each type of biopsy.
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A surgical breast biopsy requires an incision in the skin. This allows your doctor to take a large sample of tissue from the breast. In fact, the whole lump is often removed.
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A surgical breast biopsy is done to remove a sample of tissue from the breast. This tissue is then sent to a lab to be studied. Most surgical breast biopsies are done in a hospital or clinic. They are performed on an outpatient basis.
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Percutaneous breast biopsies can be done in a doctor's office or in an outpatient setting. A needle or special probe is used to remove samples through the skin.
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During a sentinel node breast biopsy, your surgeon removes the first lymph node or nodes that cancer could reach. These are screened to see if cancer cells have traveled out of the breast.
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Stereotactic breast biopsy is used to take tiny samples of your breast tissue that can be studied under a microscope. This procedure uses x-rays to find the tissue to be removed.
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Waiting for biopsy results is never easy. But you will know your results within days. You may get the results during a follow-up visit with your provider. Or your provider may call you with the results.
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A mammogram that is a digital image is just as effective at finding breast cancer as one done traditionally with X-rays, which is called analog mammography.
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Janie Pfefferkorn knows all too well the value of having a mammogram. She believes the procedure saved her life.
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Your doctor took a sample of cells from your breast using a biopsy to confirm that you have cancer.
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Finding cancer at its earliest stage can give the best chance of being able to cure it. Different tests are used to find cancers and to help find out if the cancer has spread. A positron-emission tomography (PET) scan is one type of test that can help find and stage cancers as well as monitor how well treatment is working.
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The ducts and the lobules are the two structures of the breast where cancer is most likely to occur. Your doctor can look under a microscope at the cancer cells that were collected during your biopsy to determine which type of cancer you have. The type of cancer partly determines your choices for treatment. Other rare types of cancers, such as inflammatory breast cancer and Paget's disease, can begin in the breast as well.
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IBC is a rare but aggressive type of breast cancer. Its symptoms resemble an infection or allergic reaction and are often the same symptoms as those found in some benign breast diseases. This makes diagnosis difficult. These are common symptoms of IBC.
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Key Points Inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) is a rare but very aggressive type of breast cancer (see Question 1).
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Breast cancer acts differently in each person. The way a cancer grows is called its pathophysiology. Cancer has different phases of development. The grade of your cancer is the terminology doctors use to describe how the cancer cells look. Knowing how the cells look will help your doctor predict how fast the cancer may grow and spread. The stage of your cancer is the terminology doctors use to communicate the size of a tumor and where and how deeply it has spread. When the pathologist has examined the cells, he or she will issue a report that includes the cancer's grade and stage.
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It may sound harsh to ask the question "Can I survive this?” But it's a question on most people's mind when they are facing a diagnosis of breast cancer. And the answer can be just as hard as asking the question.
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