I am a breast cancer survivor. I never thought I would be, as no one in my family had breast cancer. Heart disease was the family curse. But there's always a first, and that was me. I was diligent, screened every six months, sure I’d catch anything early. You’d think that would be enough, right? It wasn’t. There are things about breast cancer I didn’t know then. That’s why we have Breast Cancer Awareness Month, because 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed.
Let me start with this: when caught early, the survival rate is amazing—over 95%. But catching it isn’t always simple.
Breast cancer comes in many forms:
● Estrogen/Progesterone Positive (ER+)
● Ductal (the most common)
● Lobular (harder to catch, second most common—this is the one I had)
● HER2+
● Stages 0-4
● In situ (earliest stage, hasn’t spread, Elle Macpherson’s case)
I was ER+ invasive lobular, stage 2B. The tumor was large but hadn’t spread far. I had micro-invasion in two lymph nodes, which is usually a negative sign, but my team wasn’t taking any chances. Initially, I thought they'd just remove the tumor, do some radiation, and I’d be back with new breasts. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Even after a low Oncotype score and second opinions at MD Anderson, they laid it out for me: I had a monster tumor. We had to throw everything at it. The mammogram missed my 10 cm tumor—for years—because I had dense breasts. If you have dense breasts, regular mammograms can be useless. Push for an ultrasound, and don’t back down.