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my mother is also a breast cancer survivor and she was diagnosed at the age of 58. So
I, early on at the age of 30, was starting to get my annual mammograms and everything
was going fine and around the age of 42, I still thought everything was going fine. I
was really getting involved in working out with the trainer and I thought I had pulled
my right pectoral muscle. I thought maybe it’s from doing too many pushups, that I
won’t get in the shape and everything, and then it started. It really hurts and hurts
more once you know it – Murphy’s Law. I was always going for my annual mammogram
in December.
Well that particular year I thought ‘oh, I’ll just kind of push it off, maybe I’ll
do it in the Spring’, and then the right side, it started to hurt even more and I noticed
a lump and it was starting to protrude out of my skin and I thought ‘I need to get
in sooner versus later’.
I went in. I went for my mammogram and then also did an ultrasound, sure enough they did
a biopsy and I got the news about a week later that I was diagnosed with stage 2 ductal carcinoma,
and that’s pretty much what happened to me and talk about being a deer in the headlights,
but fortunately I had been going every year to get my mammogram and watching to see if
there were any changes and because of my family history, I knew that I could possibly be a
candidate for something like this.
And so when it happened, I didn’t think it was going to ever happen at the age of
42 but it did and thank goodness that I acted sooner versus later because I was diagnosed
at stage 2 versus 3 or 4 or god knows even worse. That’s what happened to me.
Dr. Jay Harness: Yeah, and I think it’s important to really emphasize Lisa’s story
here and we are going to ask Cathy also to talk about the stories that she has heard
but clearly, this is the story I have heard before. Sometimes women working out but here’s
what’s so very, very important – it’s not having a fear to touch your own body and
what’s really important I think for all of us, a big time take away message from this
Google Hangout is it’s so important to know your own body, it’s so important that if
a symptom comes up, to follow up on that. It’s so important to not be afraid to follow
up on that.
Cathy, you and I through our years of work in this field, have seen patient after patient
who wants to jump into denial Cathy, instead of saying ‘wait a minute, I got to follow
through on this’. Cathy Cole, do you want to add to that a little bit and talk on Lisa’s
story and your perspective as well?
Cathy: Well Lisa certainly has a very compelling story and it just is so important to listen
to her story that she was proactive, didn’t put it off, went to see what she needed to
do and acted upon it and Jay, you couldn’t be more right. There’s a lot of fear around
this diagnosis and but we have come a long way. There’s been so many changes, both
in medicine and surgery techniques and imaging techniques that make this so important for
us to catch these things ourselves earlier at the proper time, and also that we are going
to show a standardized approach so that you are exactly doing the same exam each month
and have the confidence to know you haven’t missed anything, so you can report any changes
that you note to your healthcare provider.
Dr. Jay Harness: I want to echo that very, very much. One thing Lisa though about your
story that is not typical and that’s pain.
Dr. Jay Harness: You pointed that you had pain, and Cathy and I have seen lots and lots
of patients who have come in complaining of pain in their breast and then thinking ‘oh
my gosh, this is breast cancer’. In fact frankly, it’s not typical at all for breast
cancer to present with pain.
Now in my line of work I tell people I never say ‘never’, I never say ‘always’.
So that was one of the important things that led to your diagnosis. So I don’t want people
out there, over the hangout to be thinking ‘oh my gosh, I’ve got pain, I’ve got
to run down tomorrow and have this evaluated’. But I what I really want to emphasize is the
proactive stance that you have.