Great News!

We went in and met with the Radiation Oncologist today. She had the results of my full body scan. The cancer was only in the brain, so it wasn't anywhere else. This is good. Very good. I will still need to continue to heal from the surgery (and that's going well), and then we will come up with a treatment plan that will include hopefully just localized radiation and easy chemo. The radiation will probably cause headaches and hair loss, but we won't start that until I am well healed from the brain surgery. We will meet with the chemotherapy oncologist on February 14th to talk about what treatment we will want to get started with. 

So because this cancer is my breast cancer again, it had broken off into the blood stream or lymph fluid and hid in the brain before chemo and radiation. And most chemotherapy does not travel to the brain very well at all, so that's why it wasn't wiped out. But since my cancer is HER2 positive, which is treated by the "easy chemo" drug called herceptin that does travel to the brain, I am hoping that we can do the easy chemo right away and not worry too much. 

We will be doing frequent MRIs (at least every couple of months for the first while) to monitor any tumor growth because they don't go in and willey-nilley cut out good brain so they don't go as much as a border as they do when it is just breast tissue (we can totally get along without that, lol).