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Sarasota, perhaps this will help you to understand "staging" a little better:

Cancer Staging
Cancer staging systems describe how far cancer has spread anatomically and attempt to put patients with similar prognosis and treatment in the same staging group. Since prognosis and treatment depend quite a bit on the stage, you can see how important it is to know what stage you have! At the same time other factors, including your general health, your own preference, and the results of biochemical tests on your cancer cells will contribute to determining the prognosis and treatment. So while the stage is important it is not everything.

The concept of stage is applicable to almost all cancers except for most forms of leukemia. Since leukemias involve all of the blood, they are not anatomically localized like other cancers, so the concept of staging doesn't make as much sense for them. A few forms of leukemia do have staging systems which reflect various measures of how advanced the disease is. For most solid tumors, there are two related cancer staging systems, the Overall Stage Grouping, and the TNM system.

Overall Stage Groupings (Roman Numeral Staging)
In this system, cases are grouped into four stages denoted by Roman numerals I through IV, or are classified as "recurrent." In general, stage I cancers are small localized cancers that are usually curable, while stage IV usually represents inoperable or metastatic cancer. Stage II and III cancers are usually locally advanced and/or with involvement of local lymph nodes. Actually, these stages are defined precisely, but the definition is different for each kind of cancer. In addition, it is important to realize that the prognosis for a given stage also depends on what kind of cancer it is, so that a stage II non small cell lung cancer has a different prognosis from a stage II cervical cancer.

Unfortunately, it is common for cancer to return months or years after the primary tumor has been removed because cancer cells had already broken away and lodged in distant locations by the time the primary tumor was discovered, but had not formed tumors which were large enough to detect at that time. Sometimes a tiny bit of the primary tumor was left behind in the initial surgery and this later grows into a macroscopic tumor. Cancer that recurs after all visible tumor has been eradicated, is called recurrent disease. Disease that recurs in the area of the primary tumor is locally recurrent, and disease that recurs as metastases is referred to as a distant recurrence. Distant recurrence is usually treated similarly to stage IV disease (sometimes the terms are used interchangeably) and anyone in this situation should investigate options for both stage IV and recurrent disease. The significance of a Local recurrence may be quite different than distant recurrence, depending on the type of cancer.