What I didn't know about breast cancer

I didn't know I could get breast cancer when I had none of the major risk factors:
1. Age. Women over the age of 50 are more likely to get breast cancer, and risk increases with age. I'm 26.
2. Carrying the BRCA (or breast cancer gene), of which I tested negative.
3. Being overweight or obese. When I was diagnosed I was running 5Ks and had just got about 30 pounds on Weight Watchers, which I'm proud to say I've managed to keep off. Since I joined Weight Watchers in September 2010, my eating habits have improved significantly and I truly believe I'm an extremely healthy eater.

I guess none of that really matters because it happened anyway. We're not sure why. We're not sure if it is related to me having Leukemia at the age of 12, or not at all related. No need to figure out WHY because we don't know.

When I first got the call on the first day of Passover that my fine needle aspiration came back as positive for cancer cells, I can't exactly tell you how I was feeling. It was complete shock. It was kind of like: "are you kidding me???!!!"

I knew more tests were needed to figure out a lot of stuff about the cancer, but I had no idea how many, and what they would all mean. I pictured myself, a few days later, going to the doctor for a mammogram and right then and there her telling me how big the tumor was and what the treatment plan would be.

It didn't exactly work out that way. I had multiple mammograms and biopsies and an MRI. I was tested for the BRCA gene. There are so many factors that go not only into a person's diagnosis, but their treatment also. Their treatment depends on:
1. Type of cancer (there are many, many types of breast cancer. Some are ductal, some lobular, some metastatic, etc.)
2. Hormone receptors. Are you ER/PR positive or negative, or HER2 positive or negative? In other words, does the cancer need hormones to grow? If so, hormone therapy might be recommended. I was hormone negative.
3. Size of tumor, and its location.
4. Stage of tumor. This is based on the size of the tumor, and if other areas of the body are involved. Has it spread to the lymph nodes, or is it metastatic, meaning it's spread throughout the body?
5. Characteristics of cells: Are they high-grade or low grade, poorly differentiated, invasive or non-invasive?

Those five are just SOME of the ways doctors diagnose and figure out treatment plans for breast cancer. There's no set protocol or treatment plan. Your treatment may also depend on your age, and if you are pre or post-menopausal.

Treatments include, usually, surgery - either a masctecomy or lumpectomy - combined with radiation, chemotherapy, hormone therapy or targeted therapy. Some women receive all of these treatments while some only receive one.

Because the nature of my cancer (thankfully) was non-invasive and couldn't reach other parts of my body, chemotherapy wasn't recommended. The goal was to remove the tumor and a margin around it (which we're still working on) and prevent its recurrence. Much of my treatment was going to be based on my mastectomy surgery. Because a core biopsy showed some invasive cancer cells, they decided to remove lymph nodes to test them to see if the cancer had spread there, since if it was spreading, it would go there first. If the lymph nodes came back positive, more treatment - possibly chemotherapy - would be needed. However, we wouldn't know for sure until the surgery, and luckily, the cancer was early enough that it hadn't spread to the lymph nodes, and hadn't even left its place of origin (the milk ducts.) I did have DCIS with microinvasion, which means a little bit of cancer cells kind of "crept out" of the tumor to nearby tissue, which is why