She was first diagnosed with breast cancer somewhere in the 95-97 time period and had a lumpectomy.
She had it come back 1999-2000 time period and had a complete mastectomy. Treated for several years after with tamoxifen, but I don’t think she is still taking that, don’t know when she stopped.
So now the doctor has identified several places that it has come back - on her liver and in several places on her bones.
So, there’s that.
ETA: everyone else is surprised by this, but I’m not. All it took was one cancer cell to escape the breasts and elude the tamoxifen.
On my dad’s side of the family, there were at least two cases of serial breast cancer. There were other reproductive cancers, too.
You bet, I get my annual mammogram. And I used the reproductive cancer in the family to “persuade” the GYN to give me a hysterectomy.
Use this to guide your own health care!
At the risk of sounding morbid, now is the time to get all the family stories from your mom. Use some recording device, or buy her a journal and ask her to write: what it was like when she was growing up, some of the family stories she was told by her parents and grandparents, how she met your father…
While we’re cursing cancer, can we curse “Big Pharma” as well?
When Mom was re-diagnosed a month ago, the doctor prescribed a couple different medicines. One of those was to be filled at a pharmacy (the others are administered by infusion)
The one from the pharmacy? $1600 a month. Sixteen hundred. That’s nearly twice my mortgage payment. Medicare denied it, so the pharmacy tried to find a deal, and futzed away a whole month on that.
Now it’s too late for that particular treatment, so Mom is getting a different form of chemo that is much harder on the body. Because pharmaceutical companies are greedy bastards.
Hey, remember when we were all “Let’s find a cure for cancer” and the government gave money to private companies to do that? We forgot to make sure the drug companies couldn’t price gouge on those drugs.