Second Opinions Are Important

Friday evening, I received a call from my oncologist at Hopkins letting me know the HER2 test came back negative.  The testing of HER2 is complicated, but basically there is an additional test that can be done, called a fish test, that will confirm a negative/positive result.  Basically, the core biopsy result was negative after the fish test was done.  However, the biopsy of the tumor came back positive.  The pathologist did not do a fish test on the tumor.  Hopkins took both samples and did their own testing.  They agreed with the core biopsy results, which was done from three small samples of tissue, but when they did the fish test on the tumor itself, the result was negative.  This is really good news. 

This saves me from approx 18 treatments of Herceptin.