Hi Cathy, skin mets is very much like any rash that just doesn't respond to normal skin treatments. My first skin mets came when I had a rash on my inner thigh, my chest and face, I saw my skin specialist who was a GP for years then decided to specialise in diseases of the skin. I went home with 3 different chreams for each area. The one on the inner thigh responded to a fungacide cream, the one on the face responded to a cortisone and the one on the chest just got bigger. When I went back he asked to do a biopsy, I think he knew then what he was looking for. I had noticed it over the weeks, it had started out very small and just got bigger, it wasn't raised just red, similar to simple rash, I had tried everything before I went for help, even to smearing honey over it but nothing worked. It was this skin mets that was diagnosed that told me I was HER 3 strongly positive and still not hormone responsive. I burst out crying or course, from frustration more than anything, I had been dealing with enlarged glands for a couple of years and then graduated to skin involvement. I took Xeloda for this and noticed it going just about straight away, then I was still on it with Herceptin for an enlarged gland on my neck and a skin mets came up on my neck, it looked like I had just rubbed the area, stopped the Xeloda and then started Navelbine which shifted the skin mets and the lump. Last Christmas my neck was still red from radiaiton and it was suspected to be skin mets and it turned out that it was only radiation damage. My latest skin mets came with a new primary site on my other breast, at first it was thought to be inflammatory breast cancer so I had radiation along with Xeloda and I got severe radiation burns, I had a couple of very small dry scaley spots come up on my breast, a bit like normal sun cancer spots which are treated with dry ice, I had these spots biopsied and they came back as being part of solid tumour, so with the redness from the radiaiton it was hard to tell if there was skin mets involved, since then I have had a few more come up so I been using the cream, but I have been putting it all over for good measure, the strange thing is that the whole time my CA15-3 tumour marker has been coming down from the original 22 to now 9, so it is a wait and see. I have stopped the eostrogen blocker to entice the cancer cells to grow, apparently this is normal so the chemo drugs can locate the cells and destroy them. I have certainly learnt a lot over the last few years.
Love & Hugs Lyn
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