how bad is it?

If you receive a cancer diagnosis, one of the first questions that pop to your mind is most likely going to be: how bad is it? - which for a lot of tumor types translates into: how big is it?

Knowing how big your tumor is, together with an assessment of the status of health of your lymph nodes, will help determine more clearly the stage, prognosis, and treatment plan for your breast cancer. Now, you might think that getting the actual measurement of a tumor in a breast is an easy task, but it is not.

In order to obtain a faithful picture, three measurements are usually correlated.

The first, approximate measurement comes from an echography, which is then often followed by a mammography, and finally also by a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The last exam is the one that supplies the most accurate measurement.

Knowing the size of the tumor is crucial not only to design the treatment plan, but also to understand if the treatment is working: if chemotherapy is doing what it’s supposed to be doing, the tumor will shrink down. How much and how fast is impossible to predict, but the direction - the tumor becoming smaller and smaller - is clear.

how big is my tumor?

During chemotherapy, I underwent a few ultrasound scans in order to measure my tumor and see if the response we were hoping for was there. The results were not always great, but around February 2024, before I started the last and hardest stretch of chemotherapy, things started moving in the right direction.

So, I took the tumor size as reported in the medical file prepared by my radiologist and I asked myself: if I could hold this tumor in my hands, what would it look like? which are other things are more or less this size?

I came up with a list of eight things, here they are!