Sorry to hear erkevin It is a punch to the gut. I am going through this myself now with DW. I don't want to hijack the thread, but our experience so far has gone from terrified/death sentence to looking forward to our plans after treatment.
DW around her 54th bday in Jan of this year, noticed her nipple was inverting...weird huh, of course webmd says everything is cancer so I told her not to look it up online and lets get into the MD right away. Went to the after hours clinic the next day and a lump could be felt, mammogram scheduled and within a week we were doing a biopsy on the tumor. Found out it was a 5cm tumor and one of the most common types of breast cancer. Also found out one of the 'fingers' of the tumor was growing towards her nipple and that is what caused it to be inverted, because it was pulling it in from the inside
The thing that freaked DW was that her mother was diagnosed with BC and died about 2 years later
That was about 27 years ago and all I can say is that medicine has come a long way baby!
So we went from thinking with the diagnosis that DW would be dead within two years to having a 90% cure rate with chemo and radiation.
DW had a double mastectomy mid February, they were able to get clear margins around the tumor and the first sentinel lymph node was packed full of cancer cells and were starting to burst through that one but the other 18 they took all tested negative. Resulting in a stage IIb classification. Grade 3 aggressively growing...
Started chemo just this past Wednesday taking two drugs that they call A/C Adriamycin/cyclophosphamide and as I type, has been laid up in bed nauseated and exhausted like no other for the past 56 hours. We're hoping tonight was the worst and she'll start climbing out of the hole tomorrow. Planning on losing her hair around day 17
She has 4 cycles of that, every other week then 4 cycles of taxol every other week after the A/C, then 28 cycles of radiation. Whoo, it seems like her full time job is now going to the myriad of Doctors.
DW was beating herself up for not getting her mammograms on a regular basis and luckily the surgeon let her know that even if she had this was still going to happen, they 'might' have caught it earlier but not necessarily so.
All I can say is be there for your DW and be her support, my wife found it difficult to lose her breasts and I am thinking the hair loss is going to be another biggie. I offered to shave my head to match her soon to be bald head, but she said no go, I guess she is afraid of my huge misshapen head
Hang in there and God bless.