[Verse 1] Three letters tell the story of the tumor's reach, T is for the primary, the lesion that we breach, N counts the lymph nodes, how far the trouble spread, M is for metástase, distant, something dread. Stage zero's just a whisper, carcinoma in situ, Stage four's the wide horizon, cancer waving through you. [Chorus] Tumor, nódulo, metástase, essa é a canção, T, N, M — carved into the chart, letra por letra, não? From zero to quatro, a cartografia do mal, Stage it right, meu bem, antes de ir pro hospital. [Verse 2] Put a little letter before the T to mark the when and how, Lowercase c for clinical, what we're guessing now, Little p for pathologic, the specimen's confession, After the knife and microscope have made their full impression. yp means we hit it first with chemo or with rays, Then we restage what is left in the post-neoadjuvant days, And r, ai meu Deus, means the tumor's back again, Recurrence wears a different hat but plays the same old game. [Chorus] Tumor, nódulo, metástase, essa é a canção, T, N, M — carved into the chart, letra por letra, não? From zero to quatro, a cartografia do mal, Stage it right, meu bem, antes de ir pro hospital. [Verse 3] Now T doesn't speak one language, it shifts from site to site, In colon and in stomach, it's depth through the wall, not width, Mucosa, submucosa, muscularis propria's gate, Serosa breached means trouble, a later, deeper fate. But breast cancer counts centímetros, the ruler tells the tale, Two or five across the tissue, a measurement, a scale. And melanoma's different still, it's Breslow in millimeters deep, How far beneath the surface does that dark pigment creep. [Verse 4] The eighth edition added biology to the frame, Breast cancer now considers receptors in the game, Estrogen, progesterone, HER2 upon the cell, They fold into the staging, não é só tamanho, pode ver. Oropharynx cancer checks if HPV's involved, p16 positive tumors got a gentler stage resolved, Because a virus-driven cancer answers different to the cure, The biology's inside the letters now, of that we can be sure. [Bridge] So why memorize this alphabet of fate? Stage tells the surgeon whether to operate, Early stage, pegue a faca, go straight in and resect, Locally advanced, neoadjuvant first, respect the trek, Shrink it down before you cut, give the margins room to breathe, But stage four, metástase, palliation's what we weave — Comfort over conquest when the map runs out of land, TNM is just a compass placed in the surgeon's hand. [Chorus] Tumor, nódulo, metástase, essa é a canção, T, N, M — carved into the chart, letra por letra, não? From zero to quatro, a cartografia do mal, Stage it right, meu bem, antes de ir pro hospital. [Outro] T, N, M, repete comigo, grava isso na mente, Depth or centímetros or Breslow, always site-dependent, c, p, yp, r — a little letter, a whole different clue, Tumor, nódulo, metástase — agora a ciência é sua.
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