National Breast Cancer Foundation, Inc.

I found a lump in my right breast toward the end of my pregnancy...delivered a healthy baby boy on 12/4/07, four days before my 40th birhtday. Went for a needle biopsy in January '08, and the results were a benign fibro adenoma, but the surgeon suggested I have it removed since an ultrasound showed it was about 3.7cm. I was all for that! I had the lump -- at last some of it -- removed on 2/22/08, and on 2/29/08, was I told the pathology on the mass came back showing it was DCIS. The sugeon sent me home assuring me I wasn't going to die (at last not from this!), but that I'd need an MRI followed by more surgery and radiation treatments. I had the MRI on 3/13/08, and I go for a follow-up with the surgeon tomorrow, 3/21/08. The waiting is killing me although I've been using the waiting time to do a lot of reading on-line. I'm an at-home mom to my 2 little boys (ages 2 and 3 months), so I'm stressing about how to get through all of this quickly and disrupt their lives as little as possible. My husband is wonderful, but he can't do it all for weeks/months on end. Does anyone have any idea what sort of timeline I'm looking at and/or suggestions as to how to get appointments without waiting so long in between? I know I'll probably have treatment choices to make (lumpectomy vs. mastectomy, for instance), so it will depend. I'm also concerned about how "out of commission" I'll be during the different stages of treatment. I've read that fatigue is one common side effect of radiation, but what does that mean???