To me, it seemed like an eon till the doctor called me - yet I'm sure to him it seemed perfectly normal to wait two days. It was a short conversation, basically confirming that since the imaging revealed no new cancer, it's probably confined to the ducts beneath the nipple, the minimum for Paget's. He thinks a mastectomy is not necessary; he's just going to excise the bad stuff, which unfortunately includes the nipple itself, and hope that the pathology report supports that decision. If not, back to square one, which means mastectomy, though probably not chemo.
Many questions remain: When will surgery be? How long and how bad will recovery be? What will the path report show? Will I need more surgery for dirty margins? What about post-op treatment, since I can't be radiated twice? And so on. Sigh.
Of these, the most important is the path report: it will show if this cancer is a recurrence of the last one, or possibly a new one, and it will show the "grade" of the cancer cells. From what I've read, you don't want a recurrence, as it shows the cells were there doing God-knows-what all these years.
I feel like I dodged a bullet. Yet I can't now feel safe again, not for a long, long time.
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