After your treatment, you will be scheduled for regular follow-up appointments with our team.
During these appointments, your providers will ask questions about any symptoms, perform physical examinations, and order laboratory or imaging tests as needed. Be sure to talk with them about any symptoms or side effects and any other issues that concern you.
Typically, after five years, exams are scheduled only once a year. You will continue to have yearly mammograms of the remaining breast and the treated breast.
Breast cancer that comes back is quite treatable but the goals of therapy may be different.
If exams and tests suggest recurrence, additional lab tests, a chest x-ray, CT scan, PET scan, bone scan or a biopsy may be done. Depending on the location of a recurrent cancer, treatment may involve surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy or endocrine therapy (anti-estrogen therapy.)