Mastectomy Recovery – Comprehensive Treatment

You are going to beat breast cancer. This horrible disease may knock you back for a moment, but it will not take you. You are a fighter and you will win.

 

Our ability to detect, treat, and cure breast cancer has increased considerably over the past few decades. According to the American Cancer Society, the 5-year survival rate for breast cancer is 89 percent. This means 89 percent of women diagnosed with the disease will live at least five years, and many will live much, much longer. How have we come this far in treating breast cancer? It has been through public awareness, organizations such as the Susan G. Komen for the Cure, and tireless research. These success stories come through a comprehensive treatment program, with mastectomy being one of the possible treatments.

 

 

Not all breast cancer is alike, so staging and typing of the cancer is important. You may have chemotherapy and radiation treatment before your mastectomy or during mastectomy recovery. Cancer is a collection of abnormal cells that multiply and grow at a great rate of speed. Chemotherapy involves the infusion of chemical into the body that target rapidly dividing cells. Radiation can also disrupt the growth of these abnormal cells. When these interventions are performed before mastectomy, they are meant to decrease the size of the tumor and make it easier to remove surgically. When they are done afterwards (and this is usually chemotherapy) the goal is to kill any cancer cells that may have been missed during the mastectomy.

 

One of the important advantages of receiving chemotherapy and/or radiation prior to a mastectomy is that by debulking the tumor, as it is called, the mastectomy may actually be a lumpectomy. While a mastectomy involves removing most or the entire breast, a lumpectomy is focused on just removing the tumor itself and a small amount of tissue on all sides of the lump, tissue called the tumor border. The implications for mastectomy recovery are enormous if the procedure can be minimized to a lumpectomy. In a lumpectomy, the shape and contour of the breast is mostly conserved which is important for the emotional and psychological recovery from the procedure.

 

Some breast cancers are hormone-sensitive. In general, having a hormone-sensitive breast tumor is good news because it means that you can take a drug that can block the hormone receptor and “starve” the tumor. While chemotherapy is sometimes associated with some difficult side effects, hormone receptor blockers are generally well tolerated and can impact the course of the disease.

 

The other component of comprehensive treatment during mastectomy recovery is to follow tumor markers, if they are present in your case. As they grow, certain tumors produce substances that leak into the blood. These substances are not harmful by themselves, but they do provide a fantastic means to track the progress of treatment and to detect a recurrence if it should happen. Prior to mastectomy and chemotherapy, tumor markers will be quite high. They should decrease considerably with adequate treatment. With periodic surveillance during mastectomy recovery, low levels of the tumor marker mean that the cancer has not returned and that you are on your way to a full recovery.