FORT KENT, Maine — For women of a certain age, there are certain gender-specific health screenings to which we all become accustomed.
You know the ones I’m talking about, right, ladies?
Due to family history and other risk factors, ever since I turned 45 I‘ve made the annual trek to the doctor’s office to spend around 15 minutes being pushed, prodded, compressed and otherwise examined by X-ray mammography.
While nowhere near my top 10 ways on how I like to spend my day, it and the subsequent all-clear results had become pretty routine.
Until the day it wasn’t.
Last month’s appointment was a somewhat rushed affair because I was running late and it was smack in the middle of a busy news cycle. I’d pretty much put all thoughts about the exam and the routine “your mammogram was normal, see you next year” card I anticipated getting in the mail out of my mind by lunch time.
When I finally got home, there were voice mail messages from my regular doctor, my OB-GYN and the radiology department where the exam had been done, all wanting to “discuss my results.”
Similar messages were on my cell phone, which had been turned off while I worked that day.
I finally got through to someone the next morning and was told there was a suspect area on the mammogram they wanted to check out with an ultrasound, which was set up for the following week.
“It’s probably nothing,” I told myself. Routine due diligence on their part.
Several days later I had an ultrasound and waited about a day and half for the results, which my OB-GYN delivered.
Long story short, that suspect area was still suspect and his recommendation was for a biopsy by a breast specialist.
So much for routine.
Scared? Jumping to worst case scenarios? You bet I was.
My maternal grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age I am now. Last fall, my father was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, which certainly tipped the family history scale in my favor. And not in a good way.
Then there was the four months between my late husband Patrick’s melanoma diagnosis and his death from that cancer nearly 8 years ago.
So, yeah, I am not ashamed to admit being a tad freaked out by cancer.
A week later I was at the Eastern Maine Medical Center’s Breast and Osteoporosis Center where I met with Dr. Susan O’Connor and her medical team for an ultrasound-guided biopsy.
After going over my previous scans with me where she pointed out what I was calling “the globs” visible in the right breast, O’Connor took me into the procedure room.
Wow, was it ever crowded in there.
In addition to yours truly — looking, I might add, most fetching in my pink floral hospital shirt — and O’Connor, there were a nurse, an ultrasound technologist and a medical student observing the whole thing.
I am fairly certain the sole job of one of them was to hold me down and keep me from bolting when I saw the biopsy needle coming at me.
Not unlike a mammogram, a breast biopsy is not how I would choose to spend my day but it was nowhere near as horrific or painful as I had feared.
I credit much of that to the warmth, kindness, humor and compassion shown by that team down at EMMC.
O’Connor injected a small amount of local anesthesia into the target area and then, using real-time ultrasound imagery to guide her, took sample tissue from the two globs.
She finished up by injecting two tiny titanium “markers” into each glob, in case they ever needed future attention.
Thus tagged and released — and assured I would not set off security alarms at airports — I was allowed to get up, get dressed and was sent on my way with strategically placed ice packs and instructions to lift nothing heavy for the next 24 hours.
All that was left to do was wait for O’Connor’s call with the results, something she promised to do within two days as soon as she had them.
That was on a Wednesday afternoon. Early Friday morning I got one of the best phone calls ever with the very good news the globs are nothing more than lobes of noncancerous fibrous tissue.
The immense relief was immediately followed by a strong feeling of foolishness over my earlier fears.
“That fear is very understandable,” O’Connor told me. “Cancer is scary.”
In the cases when it is something, she stressed earlier is always better when it comes to detection.
“Early detection is important for a lot of reasons,” O’Connor said. “With breast cancer, getting it diagnosed early is literally half the battle [and] smaller is always better, so with early detection through mammography we find things before they can be felt in self exams.”
According to a national breast cancer website, about one in eight women in this country will develop invasive breast cancer, with an estimated 231,840 new cases expected to be diagnosed this year alone.
And it’s not just women. A man runs a one in 1,000 chance of developing breast cancer, with 2,350 new cases expected this year.
Even with stats like that, many people put off screenings, O’Connor said.
“There is that mindset that it might be something that the mammogram finds,” she said “It is very human and easy to not want to know and get stuck with that.”
Yeah, it is scary. But take it from me — when things are no longer routine, ignorance is not bliss.
