My sister's actually being really, really helpful. She's a long way away and recovering from her own surgery, but she understands, and she knows a lot about breast cancer (and about where to go to find information) because that was her major way of coping with her own diagnosis. She, too, has strongly suggested getting someone who isn't me or Scott to come along and take detailed notes. She says that the exact wording of what the doctors say is crucial to knowing what's going on.

Right now, I'm mainly trusting the professionals. I live in Ann Arbor, five minutes drive (or ten minutes bus ride) from the University of Michigan Hospital with its dedicated cancer center. I'm pretty confident that I'll get the best care possible there. It's going to be kind of bureaucratic because every single case is apparently put to a board of something like 40 doctors and then treated according to the consensus. That does tend to be against experimental treatments, but I'm not sure I need experimental treatments for this.

It does help that my SIL is a surgeon (vascular) in a large hospital system elsewhere in the country. I will be very surprised if her colleagues recommend anything different from the folks at U of M, but a second opinion can't hurt.