Chemotherapy is the only thing effective on TNBC

Latricia, I think you will find many of us on this board are also white and are triple neg.  In fact I have three black friends from work who also are breast cancer survivors and I am the only one of us with triple neg!!!!  I am 62 and postmenopausal as well, no cancer on either side of my family whatsoever.  Go figure!

Latricia and Kelly,

At the Living Beyond Breast Cancer website, you can download a .pdf of the new brochure on Triple Negative Breast Cancer or order the brochure. 

http://lbbc.org/content/news/lbbc-releases-new-brochure-on-triple-negative-breast-cancer.asp

Latricia, most women with TNBC are white and over 50.   African american women diagnosed with cancer are still more likely to be ER+ than TN, but they are more likely to be TN (about 35%) than are white women (about 15%).  The same goes with youth.  Young women are more likely to have TN than older women, but women of any age are more likely to be ER+ than not.     So what you see is a skewing of the proportions as you move from cancer subtype to subtype, but still, since most US women with cancer are white and over 45, most TNs are white and middle aged or older too.  Does this make sense?   It's a common source of confusion here, the 'average' 50ish white BRCA-neg TN woman thinking she is an unusual case instead of typical.   Not that it matters, but we might as well get it straight.   Plus, we feel 'negatively chosen' enough in having cancer at all.  We might as well not add to that feeling by imagining rarer circumstances than actually exist.   The true outliers are extremely young women (under 35) of any color, with any type of breast cancer.  The rest of us are middle of the pack, no matter how we feel.

-Denise

Thank you Denise....still, every onc I went to see, and I met with 8 of them, even have one in my family, plus a family friend who is an onc, had only a handful of triple negative patients.  I realize that the moniker of tnbc is relatively new, but, I still felt isolated.  They all agreed on the recipe--no one wanted to use A on me, just TC, but, they had no "confidence" in any approach at all.  It was unnerving.

I will say that:

Oh yeah, big time.  Chemo after chemo, it's a real drag.  But we all want to live as long as possible as well as possible, so there you have it.

Good question, Carol.  That's along the lines that I was thinking.  I have my surgery on Monday and I am shocked at how fast this cancer is growing.  It is the most discouraging thing to have gone through 8 chemo sessions  (last one was on the 28th of Dec.) thinking all is well, and then 2 weeks later me seeing the lump on my breast, not feeling it, and it has gotten much more painful as the days go by.  I made an appt. with my onc and saw him a couple of days ago.  He so "down-played" the whole thing.  All he would say is it is at least 50% smaller than the original lump.  He never would admit that he either, over-looked the lump, didn't know it was there, or that he was ignoring it, knowing surgery was coming up....

Denise, Pam, Steve, Unklze, and many more do a lot of research.  They can usually answer most questions or send you to a link that can.

Latricia Dear,

Edited by Carol (Tenn) - Jan 21 2010 at 12:49pm

Well said Carol!