[hutchibk]

HI Debbie - read my posts a A LOT closer. They are NOT irrelevant to the discussion. I beg to differ wholeheartedly. I did not have advanced b/c the first time my TMs hinted to us that I should go for scans. I was (stage 2b) at primary diagnosis, had mastectomy and first-line chemo, and then I was NED for 15 months. Luckily we had established a baseline for my CA 15.3 from the point at the end of my initial chemo and routinely followed my CA 15.3 while I was NED and was expected to stay that way... But my doc doesn't like to take chances, he errs on the side of caution with Her2, and believes that the earlier and smaller the mets are when found, the better the treatment options and outcomes will be... he doesn't rely on TMs as an individual indicator, but he considers them in combination with the whole picture. It is a piece of the puzzle. So then after 15 months of NED, my TMs started to inch up for a couple of months and we scanned out of an abundance of caution and found my very first mets (lungs, chest nodes) after being NED for 15 months. We found them much smaller, much earlier, and much much much more treatable than we would had we not had that initial clue and just waited for symptoms. (Sometimes there are NO symptoms until the mets are very large, making them much harder to treat and offering less options for treatment, i.e. liver mets that are small and eligible for ressection as opposed to liver mets that have taken over the liver and can only rely on chemo for treatment...) In my case, because we found it early, we were able to treat it appropriately, less aggressively, and subsequently less expensively. There can absolutely be a survival benefit, and no-one can tell me otherwise. Sorry.

If your "opinion" is that there is no benefit to watching really closely, then that is your experience. I would be careful telling others that there is absolutely "no benefit to "watching really closely", no matter how high your risk of recurrence is. NO BENEFIT." Or that "intensive surveilance does not prevent recurrence and it does not improve survival nor quality of life" - It did not prevent my recurrence, but it offered me earlier info, more treatment options with better outcomes, and did improve my survival and my quality of life. Hands down.

I take offense to the disdainful and self-righteous tone in your post. Expecially a sentence that simply says: "Duh." There are those of us who have had an entirely different experience than the "absolute certainty" that you profess in your post.