[StephN]

My perspective comes as a pre-adjuvent Herceptin patient. I have loved rooting the Herceptin trials on and cheering the good news on much lower recurrance rates! How my life could have been different!?!

Dx when Herceptin just approved for stage IV. It was a sort of "tough love" time for treatment with taxanes and some other new drugs showing good results.

I got my preliminary path report from my surgeon when I went back for the one week followup after my lumpectomy.
He carefully explained my staging from what we had in front of us. He explained that my sentinal node and the next two were full of tumor so I would need my lower axilla excised and a port placed for chemos.

Not much said about the HER2. Until I faxed that report to a cancer researcher friend who called back with more grave news and suggesting I get a second opinion with a certain oncologist.

After the second surgery I followed up with that advice and had my slides reviewed at the U of W medical center. My meeting with this new team of docs gave me more insight into my diagnosis and the fact that I would need special care to fight my aggressive disease.

Interesting how the gravity of something can break a little at a time so there is time to sort of digest what it might mean.

I never panicked, but wanted to know more about my new Best Friend. I figured better to know the devil then merely be afraid of it.

After my raging mets dx I also found the book, "The making of Herceptin." It had been recently published then, and there was no web site or other support that I could find to interact with others in my situation. Everyone I knew with mets was dying! I felt quite ADRIFT in a sea of uncertainty. That book gave me hope that there were women even worse off than I was who could respond to the Herceptin and live to tell about it. This my first inkling that I too could survive. Learning how others had responded was my main interest in buying that book.

P.S. We learn to keep breathing - even after a mets diagnosis.