Perhaps a better title for this posting should have been "Breast cancer, the disease that keeps on giving". I've had a couple of worrisome weeks due to a new complication and am finally, I think, okay. In December we noticed an abnormality in my nipple and my radiation oncologists were so nice about following up and kept asking me to come back to check on it. Well, after Christmas they informed me that they were concerned I had Padget's disease. Padget's disease is traditionally considered a hallmark sign of breast cancer--ductal carcinoma cells slough off and travel along the ducts to the nipple. If you have Padget's disease you will have crusting of the nipple--which is why all the breast exam pamphlets tell you to look for it. Basically, they were concerned that I had cancer again. Because the treatment for Padget's is radiation and I had finished my radiation 6 weeks earlier they were very perplexed as to what was going on. We decided to be conservative since a biopsy of my nipple was not something I really wanted.
They are treating it as a rare but reported delayed side effect of the radiation and keeping a close eye on me. I joked with the surgeon the other day that I figure I'll be some interesting case study and my breast will end up in the literature and she laughed (I'm not sharing any information on that so don't ask) but didn't rule it out....
So stay tuned...
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