Now DCIS - may have had it for 12 years!

[dawny]

Hi all
I found a new lymph node lump a few months ago, watched and waited for a while, decided to get it out, so I had a Node dissection with only 1/11 nodes affected, which is great (!) and only a couple of days before surgery the BS found another lump in the same breast, so she took that too, as well as the area my primary lump was. This came back as DCIS. So now I have to decide what to do about that. My BS is on holidays , so yesterday i went to another BS just to check everything was healing ok. He came into the room and said "I haven't seen you for 12 years" I was wracking my brain, thinking "have I met you before?" and then I remembered that when I was pregnant with my first child, I had some bleeding from the nipple. I was sent this BS, he had a look and did some reading, and said that it was a rare thing, but sometimes just happens during pregnancy. He didnt do a mammo or anything else. That was the end of that, no more symptoms, new baby, life was good. Now he thinks maybe I had DCIS back 12 years ago, and it developed into stage 1V invasive cancer last year. He can't be sure of that, of course, but talked about writing a paper, so other BS can keep an eye out for it. Now I am beating myself up over it, why didn't I go back after having my son to get it checked out again?. Obviously I wasn't thinking about cancer back then. Anyway, now I have to decide what to do next, if it has been there that long and already turned invasive, shall i just have a mastectomy? I now wish I had that last week, I am still recovering from that surgers, I don't like the thought of going straight back in! I am such a wimp, I hated all the drainage tubes, and blood! My other option is to wait and have a mastectomy if it goes astray again.

Any suggestions?

Thank you for listening to me go on and on!

Dawn