[bejuce]

You know, this thread is right on target with what I was feeling yesterday. I'm undergoing my radiation treatments (have 10 left) and every Wednesday I see my resident and on Thursday my radiation oncologist. I talk to them as much as possible about what I'm feeling physically and emotionally, and also ask questions about medical news that I read about (a lot of them on this board).

In my conversation with the resident yesterday, I asked him about the likelihood that I had/have undetected micrometastases in my body because of my LABC (stage IIIC) diagnosis or in other words, whether we should assume that to be the case. That prompted a conversation in which he basically told me how much is unknown about this disease, saying that there have been cases reported in the literature of women with LABC to have survived without ever progressing to stage IV and without having done any chemo and/or radiation, that there are cases in which cancer cells go to other parts of the body and never form another little colony, cells that go to other parts really fast and grow like crazy, and on, and on.

I left the appt with the feeling that there are still a *LOT* of unknowns about this disease. Sure, progress has been made in many areas, but there still needs to be enough funding for fundamental research on how the cells behave, what triggers their growth, and so on. I hope this research moves faster in the next few years so we can all benefit from it.

It's very frustrating to be a patient and have so much uncertainty on whether all the drugs, radiation, etc., we undergo is actually being effective or not... So I think the best that we can do is to inform ourselves as much as possible and grill our doctors without feeling bad about it.