You must feel devastated.I have been reading your posts and i know exactly what you are going through. I am actually so sad that you have make such a big decision so soon. Be strong and think positive. We have cancer, but cancer doesn't have me. I have been saying it everytime i feel down.

I think i am going start getting chemo soon. I am really scared. I guess we all are scared. I hope you make the right decision.

jessica

Ryan

10/28/07 8:23pm

Be strong. You an do this.

Hi Melissa,

Here's my story as it relates to your situation. I was diagnosed with IDC in my left breast last December. It was devastating news that hit just as the guy I thought I was going to marry was breaking up with me. I needed to decide between a lumpectomy (and radiation) or a mastectomy of my left breast. To be honest, the thought of taking the right side off prophylactically hadn't even occurred to me at that time. I was just focusing on the decisions that needed to be made at the time, as that was all I could handle. For various reasons, including that I had small breasts (that had actually shrunk even more with the combo. breakup and diagnosis!), I decided to get a mastectomy. I had my left breast (and nipple) removed in January with a saline tissue expander put in.

Shortly after that my insurance said they would test me for the BRCA 1 & 2 breast cancer susceptibility genes, since my cousin had been diagnosed with breast cancer at age 30. While I actually tested negative, the genetics folks said they still suspected I had a genetic predisposition. (We know there are other genes involved in breast cancer, and in fact, one was just discovered recently, but we know there are more out there that we don't yet know about.) In any case, it was basically at that point that I decided to have my right side removed prophylactically. I was pretty upset about the idea of losing my remaining breast, in large part because that meant giving up the sensation--it was tough to lose the sensation with the left side, now I would no longer have it on either side. But I actually came to terms with that pretty quick. So, May 15th I had my right breast (and nipple) removed and a tissue expander put in.

When they took off the bandages, I was very dissapointed (to put it mildly) to see that the incision was very different on the right side than the left. The left was diagonal, owing to the location of the tumor and calcifications. The right incision was horizontal, curving up at the side. I'm still not clear why my surgeon couldn't make the right incision mirror the left more (and I thought we were on the same page before surgery), but his response was that the horizontal incision would "give a better result." This really bugged me for a while as my concern was more that I'd rather have the scars as symmetrical as possible, not "get a better result on the right side." Anyway, it bugs me a little still, but I have basically come to terms with the uneven scars, and they are slowly fading.

I now have silicone implants in that are a tad bigger than my original breasts (large Bs, I guess, now). (They had injected saline through a port in each side over the course of a couple months to "expand" them.) They also "rebuilt" my nipples, which I actually think is pretty fascinating. The rebuilt nipples are not so even (one side is bigger than the other), but I feel a lot more "whole" with nipples than without (as it was for several months).

I have to say that when I was deciding to have the right side removed prophylactically, I was also thinking that it would probably be good because they would then look a lot more alike. It's hard to know what it actually would have looked like, because if I didn't have the right side removed, they were going to have to put an implant in the right side anyway to make it more even with the left (I was pretty darn small-breasted, so they would have had to do something or I would have just been pretty uneven if they didn't).

I have not for one moment questioned my decisions to (1) have the mastectomy over lumpectomy of my left side and (2) have my right side removed prophylactically. I am glad I did it. I do sometimes wish I had considered having them removed at the same time as it is likely the incisions would have been much closer to being symmetrical, but I made the decisions I could make at the time I had to make them.

Hope my story helps you a little with your decision. I will keep track of your progress and decisions on your blog (so keep posting!) and will be thinking of you as you go through this. Hang in there. It may not seem like it at the moment, but you *will* get through this!
-Robin