TRANSCRIPT
Real Patient
So when I was in my early 30s, at age about 31, 32, I noticed that I had a lump in my breast. By that time I already knew that my grandmother was a breast cancer survivor. She was in the process of going through breast cancer. She did have a mastectomy where she lost one of the breasts. And it really scared me at first when I noticed the lump.
So I elected to have the lump removed. It came back and they said, okay, you just – “fibrocystic breast” is what I was told. So I felt good about moving forward with it. But then I found lumps in both the left and the right breast.
So I was given the option again: do you want to leave them in or do you want to take them out? I elected once again to take them both out and let’s look at it and make sure we’re fine. All three of the biopsies that I’ve had up to this point, beginning with the very first one, all of them I was told benign. And after the first one, benign, and I probably could have stopped having surgeries at that point, but when you have a person in your family that has had breast cancer, it makes you a little bit nervous.
My advice to any young lady that – any woman that has found a lump or anything in their breast, is the first thing don’t, don’t blow it off as something that, you know, you think that’s there, maybe that’s been there. I would strongly advise to any woman to make sure that you get to your doctor and you get some advice on how to do it.
Now what worked for me was getting them out, but there’s also things that you can do to talk to your doctor. But I would definitely say the breast exams; definitely do your breast exams. Definitely get, when you’re a certain age, make sure that you’re going and get a mammogram when you’re supposed to. Because the earlier we find things, technology has come so far that we don’t have to have necessarily, even if you have cancer, it’s not necessarily a death sentence.