. I believe there's nothing to worry about until a doctor tells you there's something to worry about.

If there are ten million cells in a tumor and chemotherapy kills
99.99% of them, that still leaves 1,000 tumor cells. The larger the tumor (more cells) the higher the probability that at least some of the cells will be chemoresistant. A tumor with only a thousand cells can't be detected by anything at this point - it's just too small. I don't think marker test will detect tumor activity at this level.

If you only had 1,000 tumor cells in you today then it's possible that you could live a completely normal life and die of something else when your time came.

My wife Deborah has had eight treatments of AC + Taxotere and four C + Taxotere before we saw more tumor activity. During chemo we saw her lung mets decrease by more than half - it turned out that her tumors didn't like Adriamycin at all - but you can't do A forever. When we removed the nasty red stuff from her treatments her tumor markers started rising again. So - the tumor cells that are left in her are resistant to Cytoxan and Taxotere - at least in the protocol she was on. We haven't tried metronomic dosing to see if that helps.

We've been doing Herceptin for about six weeks so it's a little early to tell how we're doing - I don't imagine we'll know a whole lot until we do a new set of scans in September.

Stage IV bc is a different animal - since most of the time chemo doesn't kill *all* of the tumor cells, you work with one treatment until it stops working and then you move on to something else and use that until you see disease progression - and so on.

Anyway, I'm glad that they didn't find any evidence of disease after chemo, Linda. That makes you NED, right?