Hello

Hi Koigirl

Welcome to the forum, I'm Daisy53 one of the Community Champions on this forum.  I'm sorry to hear that you have been diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer.

Wishing you the best of luck with the rest of your treatment and with your operation.

Best wishes

Daisy53

Hi Koigirl 

I am sorry you are facing treatment for triple negative breast cancer. I have TNBC too and know the treatment can be gruelling. Hopefully your immunotherapy issue is short lived. They do have to take care as immunotherapy can cause quite serious issues. Wishing you all the best with your treatment. 

Hi Coddfish

thank you for your response. I have had a phone call today from my oncologist and have been told that the treatment has been successful so far in regard to chemo and immunotherapy. Next step is surgery so although anxious and nervous I’m all for it! I’m training to become a nurse (yes even at my age lol ) and I want to get back on course and finish what I started. Plus, I have to show my kids that you can achieve what you set out to do. You just need to put your mind to it xxx

Hi. I was diagnosed on Monday with TNBC and I am still reeling and not sure what to do with myself. I know that positivity is important but I am struggling with that at the minute. I hope joining this group will help and give me a place & people I can talk to. Anyway "hi".

It’s worth joining the main Breast cancer forum too as that’s busier than this one. Don’t stress about being positive - it might make it easier to deal with treatment but it makes no difference at all to your cancer. 

Thank you 

Thank you for saying this Coddfish .

I've been kicking this around in my head for a couple of days since you wrote it because I genuinely hear so much about being positive contributing to curing cancer, almost like you can think your way into a good outcome. I have even heard someone say that overhauling your life (i.e. changing your diet, starting exercise etc.) can influence cancer to resolve by itself in as little as 48 hours! So I've been terrified that if I don't think this way and make all these changes, it won't get any better for me.

Then I thought back logically over different scenarios during my journey. I was in a tailspin about the initial lump and it was cancer. I felt positive about the results from my surgery and they were clear. I was very positive about the lumpiness under my scar just being scar tissue and it was more cancer. I catastrophised about a new lump in the other breast and it was just a cyst. I was in a frenzy that my CT scan results would show the cancer had spread everywhere and they didn't.

So I can see now, especially writing it down here, that there's no correlation between how I felt or thought about these events and the outcome.

I definitely agree that a certain mindset can help in terms of how you handle treatment so what I'm going to try now is to live as well as I can on my terms alongside treating the cancer rather than changing my life based on some random internet content creator's prescription to try to get rid of the cancer. 

Thanks again for adding some clarity (and sanity!) to what has otherwise for me been a somewhat murky situation!

All the best to you. x

Thanks MsC19754c 

There have been some interesting threads on here in the past about toxic positivity - the sense that if you do succumb it’s somehow your fault for not being positive enough. That’s what I really dislike about the whole positivity thing. You can’t think your cancer away. You can of course have an easier path through treatment by staying as well as you can and by keeping life as normal as you can. 

As for all the stuff on diet and exercise, I am sure it can help with recovery but there’s no point blaming yourself for actions in the past. You can’t go back and change them and the biggest risk factor is being a female with breasts. I know plenty of people who were really healthy but have cancer. Whilst I have always drunk some alcohol my diet is good and I was a keen runner until this all hit me. A cell mutated. In my case with pd-L1 positive TNBC, it just happened to be able to hide from my immune system. It grew into a blood vessel and spread into my liver. The breast tumour wasn’t palpable when picked up on my routine mammogram. Absolutely nothing I could have done to change the outcome. 

Thank you so much for all you have said it has really helped and moved my mindset. I am still in the very early stages of my journey but your common sense approach and logic has definitely made a great deal of sense amongst everything that is happening so a big thank you. 

Same Bumbly4.5 . I've felt so much better about everything over the last few days after reading this thread.