Does every person have the same amount of lymph nodes in a certain place, like under the arm? You often hear something like 14 out of 19 were positive, or 12 out of 20.
In my case, and before I had surgery and it was found that many lymph nodes were not only involved but had spread to adjacent fat tissue, and were stuck to each other, and nerves, and also were found in other places besides under the arm...one of my surgeon's reports said that my axially lymph nodes were visible upon ultrasound but not palpable. Nothing suspicious showed up on the MRI either that was taken two weeks prior to surgery.
It seems like the TAC had worked very successfully on the breast but not so on the lymph nodes and which could not even be confirmed were present in a malignant form before.
My questions are 1) about the number of those nodes in each individual and if they are equal 2) is it common for affected lymph nodes not to show up on ultrasound and/or MRI 3) that TAC is not very effective on lymph nodes and what that means in terms of prognosis.
The way I understand it now is that even if my cancer is called metastatic breast cancer, that does not mean it is stage 4 because there is no evidence the cancer has spread to other parts of the body besides to the lymph nodes and surrounding tissue, and for which I had radiation therapy. (I had chemo first, and stage 3)