Dear Readers,
This week marks eight years, exactly, since I had an abnormal mammogram that led to my breast cancer diagnosis. I was 42 years old, and lucky because the excellent radiologist who discovered my tumor was a super-specialist in breast imaging, the kind of radiologist who spends her work-time analyzing mammograms, performing breast sonograms and taking biopsies of suspicious lesions. She doesn’t often look at hip films or ordinary x-rays. She just does mammograms, mammograms and mammograms, and sometimes additional tests to evaluate abnormalities she detects in those. She knew her stuff.
I was afraid to get a mammogram because I didn’t want to learn I had cancer. Back then, my breasts were so glandular it was hard for me, an oncologist, to discern what might be a pathological lump, or not. I feared having a “false positive,” and undergoing multiple tests to evaluate abnormal images that would turn out to be nothing but big-bill inducing benign lesions.
Really I was hesitant in visiting her office. I didn’t have time for cancer, because I was in pain from a crumbling spine and needed to get my back fixed before even opening up the possibility of additional medical problems. I wanted to work as much as I could then, before and after that big reconstructive spinal surgery, so that I might continue research and publish more papers. Besides, my sons were young then — ages 8 and 10 — and I didn’t want to not be able to make dinner because I was throwing up, or die.
Not getting a mammogram was a way of not finding out. The shoemaker’s kids don’t get shoes. An oncologist doesn’t get a mammogram…
My general internist, whom I trusted, insisted that I go for screening. “You’re over forty, you know,” she said. But I had no family history of the disease, then – this has since changed, and I didn’t consider myself at increased risk. Ultimately I went for the mammogram because I knew it was the responsible thing to do, to take care of myself.
When I had the mammogram, and the sono to evaluate an abnormality, and the core needle biopsies in the next week, I wasn’t afraid so much as I was annoyed by all the inconvenience. “Who has time to be a patient?” was my attitude. I came to each doctor’s appointment armed with research articles and colleagues’ manuscripts to review. I had meetings to attend, and responsibilities, and participated actively in a typical two-career family kind of up-and-out-early way of raising our sons.
All of that is behind me now, as is the chemo, hair loss, some incidental fractures, surgeries, generalized fatigue and sad times that followed. How lucky I am that I went that day. There is no doubt in my mind.
Next year, approximately 45,000 women in the U.S. will die of metastatic breast cancer. Why I advocate for screening mammograms is because I know that a significant fraction of those advanced cases, perhaps half or more, could be prevented by early detection. That benefit would be a boon to the public health: perhaps as many as 20,000 — 30,000 women spared per year from morbidity, suffering and mortality of metastatic breast cancer, which is currently an incurable, costly disease.