After reading several medical papers and treatment guidelines, I finally figured out the correct question to ask and how to ask it.  I may have more useless knowledge in my head that I hope to never use again.

So this leads me to the exciting news that I am in NED!  No Evidence of Disease!!  So with advance stage cancer they never say you are in remission, they never say you are cancer free.  At least this is the case with my medical oncology team.  Because it is not known 100%.

So in advanced breast cancer we did chemo first to shrink and kill as many cancer cells as we could so they can more easily remove it.  Then we go to surgery where they remove the cancer.  My margins were clear which means that there is a pretty good chance there is no cancer left. We then do Physical Therapy so I can get movement in my arms back so I can put my arm over my head to do Radiation.  So at this point…why the hell are we doing radiation?  Well because there could be microscopic cancer cells that are undetectable through any type of scan. So they take the information from the pathology report and based on that and your stage of cancer (in my case Stage IIIB) they do radiation  therapy.  So after this there should be no trace.  But again…with advance cancer these buggers are aggressive and like to move…undetected if they can get away with it.  Now because I am ER/PR and HER2 Positive I’m on hormone therapy. And what this does is keeps it so if there are any microscopic undetectable cancer cells floating around it will starve them.  My cancer fed off of hormones.  So no hormones…no food…they can’t survive.  So I will be on the hormone therapy for 5 years. This should be enough time to starve off any that could have made it through all that other stuff.  After 5 years they reassess the hormone thing to see if they are going to keep me on it or let me go.  It is possible that if I were to stop the hormone therapy the cancer would come back. With Breast cancer it could come back in the lymph nodes, or chest wall (I don’t have breasts for them to breed there so…) But it could also move to other parts of the body…bone, liver etc.  If it does move to another part of the body years down the line it would still be considered breast cancer and they would treat it as such.  They do not do any type of MRI/CT/PET scans as they would not be able to pick up any microscopic traces.  So this is why they just say you have “NED”

But that’s not to say that down the line I could get another type of cancer…No telling…but Breast cancer doesn’t cause other cancers.

This is all what I’ve been told today.