Incredibly fabulous news – pathology results are in!

TL;DR: The cancer is dead dead dead and gone gone gone. I’m beyond excited. Still healing from surgery and still have a fair bit of treatment to go.

Today is a fabulous day! We’ve been working, hoping, and praying for this for a long time and today we got the pathology results from the breast tissue and lymph nodes removed during surgery on Friday.

The fabulous news is that I had a  pCR (pathological complete response) to the cancer treatment. This is defined as no invasive and no in situ residuals in breast and nodes. The extra exciting part is that the report also indicated that there was no indication of treatment effects in the lymph nodes so the cancer appears to have fully stayed locally in the breast tumor. (The testing I’d done prior to starting treatment was inconclusive on whether or not one of my lymph nodes had cancer. The node was negative for cancer on the biopsy, but lit up on the MRI & PET scan and it wasn’t definitive as to whether the MRI/PET information was due to inflammation of the node from the biopsy or an indication of cancer in the node. The biopsy could have been clear because it was a core biopsy and so it could have gotten a clean sample while “right next door” was a cancerous one.) The lymph nodes are the “gateways” for cancer spreading to other parts of the body so this is also fabulous news as it seems to confirm that as we’d hoped, the cancer remained local to the breast.

When my surgeon called this morning she said “are you ready for the best news ever”? I could hear the smile in her voice and it is the best news ever! I totally teared up with tears of relief and joy! I got everything I wanted for Christmas this morning.

Thank you to all of you for your healing thoughts and prayers and support! It’s all been answered and there are no words to describe how relieved, grateful, and excited I am. (And Mike, and everyone else!) What joy this is! My cancer-versary is officially 12/2, the day it was all removed!

I still have to do radiation, 9 more rounds of the immunotherapy Keytruda (27 weeks), and the two other surgeries, but it feels so good to know that there’s not a tumor (even it was a dead one!) in my body anymore.

The news also still doesn’t feel real. This was the first super measurable goal, and here we really are. Yay!

I also want to thank everyone for the comments here and on FB, texts, messages, emails, calls, cards, and all the other beautiful ways you reach out…thank you so much! I’m sorry I don’t get to reply to every single one, but please know I see and read/hear all of them and they all mean so very much to me!

I’ve still got a ways to go on the recovery here with last Friday’s surgery, but I do feel better each day and so that’s a win. More to come!