Chapter 7 Taking Your Lumps: Lumpectomy

In This Chapter
➤ What “lumpectomy” means
➤ Anticipating the surgery
➤ What to expect during surgery
➤ The post-surgery forecast
When the surgeon says, “We’ll take out a lump about the size of a golf ball,” he may
be describing your lumpectomy. Depending on the size and stage of your cancer and
the size of you, a lumpectomy can refer to the removal of anything from 1 percent
to 50 percent of your breast. Still, thousands of women who undergo a lumpectomy
applaud the treatment for an obvious reason: it saves most of their breast tissue.
Furthermore, today’s research suggests that for a majority of women with breast can-
cer at Stage I or II, the combination of a lumpectomy and radiation therapy is prefer-
able to a mastectomy.
Following a lumpectomy, most women never experience any change in appearance,
apart from an inch-long scar along one side of the breast. If your surgeon recom-
mends a lumpectomy (or if he recommends any of several other procedures that
amount to the same thing), we’re here to alleviate your fears and talk you through
the experience. In this chapter, we’ll tell you about the many terms used to describe
the same surgical procedure and describe what you’ll most likely experience before
surgery, what the surgery itself is usually like, and what you can probably expect
afterward—short- and long-term.