Due to a computer problem and having to buy a new one this took two weeks to add to the blog.
For those of you confused by all of the news stories and discussion concerning mammograms a few weeks ago here is more to think about. As a breast cancer survivor women ask me for my thoughts about tests, and medical decisions. But my personal experience won’t help to clarify anything for you in this new controversy because my tumor didn’t show up on a mammogram.
I found my tumor on my forty-seventh birthday. It hurt when I raised my arm to blow dry my hair. And the pit of my stomach flipped because I knew something was very wrong and this was not going to dissipate like previous little lumps had. When I got a mammogram they put a metal bead on the lump to let the radiologist know where to focus. But the tissue was so dense that the lump wasn’t defined. So I had an ultrasound and that is how they decided that I needed to see a surgeon. The surgeon did a needle biopsy but that came back negative. I decided I wanted it out anyway so I had surgery to have it removed. It was when I went back in a week later to have the incision checked the doctor told me the biopsy had come back positive for cancer and he hadn’t gotten clean edges.
The facts are that the average age of women diagnosed with breast cancer is 47, and based on age, 70 to 90 percent of those women didn’t have any family history or any other indicators. So what would my advice to women be? Get a mammogram at forty as a baseline. So that as you age and get more they can compare them. The doctor that did my sentinel node before my second surgery said there was a dramatic difference between my most recent mammogram and the one two years before. I have a sister who just turned forty. As a woman with a family history I would tell her to get a mammogram now and I think every two years between forty and fifty would be sufficient.
The most shocking thing happened after I finished treatment a year after finding the tumor and needed a follow up mammogram. As a matter of course most insurance companies offer free routine mammograms to women after the age of forty. I found out after having breast cancer that the word routine is defined very narrowly by insurance companies. They claim that after having cancer it is no longer routine and patients must then start paying the co –pay. Their policies are counter to preventing a recurrence. But then nobody thinks that insurance companies really care about the patients.
