Breast Cancer – Clinical Examination

Transcript

You’ve made your first appointment to see the breast surgeon. You’re waiting in the room, surgeon walks in, you’re just ready to know what’s the next step. So your breast surgeon will probably go over your pathology. They’ll go over the size of your tumor. They’ll go over all the logistics of the tumor and a lot of the things that are going on with that particular tumor. The genetics of the tumor, the tumor markers, they’ll probably review some of your imaging. What do they do next? They do the exam. The exam is vital to the clinical prognosis, because what we’re looking for is verifying the size of the tumor that was seen on the imaging. And then we’re also looking at your lymph nodes, because we know that lymph node involvement has a lot to do with your long-term prognosis. And it also guides the treatment plan. So your lymph nodes is where, when you have a breast cancer, that’s where it goes first. So when we say, “Has my breast cancer spread?” Well, if it has, it goes to the lymph nodes first, and then it goes to the rest of the body. So it’s sort of like the first place where we’ll find if this disease has gotten out of the breast. And the lymph node exam is very important to know where we’re going to treat you and what guidelines that we’re going to use from a clinical standpoint.