Inflammatory breast cancer is a very aggressive form of the disease. Thankfully, it is a rare type and is marked by several symptoms. Becoming aware of inflammatory breast cancer symptoms is vital to survival especially since this malignancy can spread very quickly.

A Simple Definition

With the inflammatory type of breast cancer, cancer cells block the lymph vessels found in the breast so that it looks inflamed or red and swollen. In the United States, this type of breast cancer accounts for less than 6 per cent of diagnosed cases.

Usually, the carcinoma cells of this type of breast cancer are very invasive. Normally, they begin in the cells that line the milk ducts. Once they spread beyond the ducts, the cancer progresses so rapidly that in a matter of weeks or months the cancer can be diagnosed as stage III or IV.

Random Facts about the Inflammatory Type of Breast Cancer

The median age of diagnosis for the more common type of breast cancer is 62 years while the median age for the inflammatory type is 57 years. This means that it tends to be diagnosed in women of younger ages.

For some reason, it is more frequently diagnosed in African American women at younger ages with a median age of 54 compared to 58 years for white women. It is also more common in obese women than in women of normal weight.

Symptoms

The symptoms of breast cancer are extremely easy to detect when it is the inflammatory type. Generally, the affected breast becomes swollen and red or pink. This is often accompanied by a feeling of warmth and tenderness in the breast. In some cases, the affected breast will appear bruised instead of reddish.

When the blockage of the ducts becomes severe, the skin of the breast becomes pitted, much like the skin of an orange. This may or not be accompanied by a marked increase in breast size. Other symptoms include a feeling of heaviness, burning, or tenderness in the breast. Lymph nodes may become palpable under the arm and near the collarbone.

Treatments

New treatments are constantly being tested as interventions for inflammatory breast cancer. Persons who have been diagnosed to have it are often encouraged to participate in clinical trials that test these treatments.

The usual protocol for treating the inflammatory type of breast cancer consists of a multimodal approach, which has been seen to produce better responses from patients; it has also improved survival rates. The first step in this approach is systemic chemotherapy in order to shrink the tumor. After this, surgery is done to remove the tumor followed by radiation therapy.

Surgery may take the form of modified radical mastectomy, which means removing the entire affected breast, the lymph nodes under the adjacent arm and quite often, the lining over the underlying chest muscles. While the chest muscles are preserved, the smaller chest muscles may also be removed.

Other therapies include targeted therapy using drugs such as trastuzumab for certain types of tumors and hormone therapy for cancers that depend on estrogen for growth. Sometimes postoperative patients are given adjuvant therapy, which includes additional chemotherapy, antihormonal therapy, targeted therapy (such as trastuzumab) or some combination of these treatments.

There is a lot of research going on to find out how inflammatory breast cancer begins and how it grows. Since it is a very aggressive type of cancer, the information that can be discovered would be vital to increasing the chances of survival of women and men afflicted with this disease. People who find that they have it should try to join clinical trials seeking new treatments that can further improve chances of cure.

Those who have come face to face with death because of breast cancer know that the experience of fighting breast cancer is one that changes a person’s life. In the United States alone, there are more than 2.9 million breast cancer survivors and each one has valuable stories to tell about how different their lives have become.

What Breast Cancer Survivors Say

The term breast cancer survivor is, in itself, often contested. Some feel that the word is a narrow description of the experiences that going through breast cancer entails; others feel it tends to take out of the equation people who are dying of cancer and still some feel that the word places emphasis on longevity so that quality of life is inadvertently ignored or subsumed.

Some illnesses are over when they are over while some stay around and need to be managed for the rest of a person’s life. Breast cancer falls under neither category. After all the treatments are done, there is no maintenance pill to keep cancer at bay the way medication would control hypertension or diabetes. Most of all, people who have gone through breast cancer are never able to say it is over. In fact health professionals are careful about declaring that patients are cured; usually survivors are merely pronounced cancer-free.

What Happens After Treatments

After six months to maybe a year of marathon treatments, most cancer survivors are eager to go back to normal living. The first thing they get to realize is that life after breast cancer treatments does not mean closing the book on breast cancer; it merely means moving on to another chapter of the same book.

Breast cancer survivors expect that they will be able to at last go back to their old routine and be as productive as before. Instead, they find that living as a survivor means being able to first of all deal with some situations common to those who have gone through treatments:

1. Even after their hair and eyebrows have grown back, survivors often find that they suffer from lack of energy and constant fatigue. Six months to a year of multiple cycles of chemo, plus surgery plus radiation will take their toll on the human body. The body needs to recover from the all-encompassing onslaught and recovery is a process that cannot be rushed. Often the fatigue comes partly from low blood counts – a result of the body’s decreased ability to produce red blood cells, immune cells, and platelets.

The only way that the problem of fatigue can be resolved is to eat right, get regular physical exercise at the level the body can handle. Some survivors keep a daily journal of their daily activities and take note of when their energy levels are up and when these plummet. This enables them to plan their days accordingly and to include a daily time for rest.

2. Many women who come out wining in their fight against breast cancer find they have to deal with “chemo brain.” This term refers to post treatment mental changes that include diminished memory and inability to focus. As a rule, in order to recover from the after effects of treatments, it takes the body the same amount of time that the whole cancer episode took – from the time of discovery to the last drop of chemo.

3. While living with the demands of a recovering body, many learn that the most valuable lesson of all is learning to adjust their priorities and concentrate on the important things. The phrase “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” might as well have been coined for people who have managed to beat cancer. Survivors learn not to waste their energy on trying to get everything perfectly done. Once they can let go of the nonessentials, they learn to live well, eat well and enjoy each day, no matter how imperfect, as a precious gift.