[Lani]

Upon reading your other posts it seems you are an early breast cancer survivor, not a Stage IV.

You seem to be hounded by the thought that herceptin may not have taken care of your cancer, that it may return. That is possible, but the good news is, that , with herceptin, your chance of recurring is now LESS than if you had not been her2+ to begin with!

Count your blessings.

I personally believe that testing for residual cancer cells in the bone marrow might be the secret to telling who is going to recur (cancer stem cell "hypothesis") and that treating with different combos until those disseminated tumor cells in the marrow dissapear might prove the trick!

Until and IF that becomes the standard of care, the guidelines do not even include any additional scanning....just waiting to see if you get mets in your lungs or liver or brain or a bone hurts or breaks.

Until we determine whether finding these things early makes a difference-- when looked at in ALL TYPES OF BC lumped together they didn't-- in prognosis, the guidelines won't be changed. Something we should all try to motivate scientists to study is whether catching her2+ bc while there is only one or a few small bone, liver, brain etc mets and treating the met with surgery, radiation, embolization, SRS etc prolongs life/leads to some cures.