Early Detection Saves Lives

Isn't that right Susan G. Komen?  Didn't you teach me that early detection saves lives?  At least, that's what I always believed, and of course I still do.

I am one of the lucky ones.  I have health insurance.  And up to this point in my diagnosis it has been the most amazing coverage ever.  The bills alone for my ultrasound and mammograms would be too much for me to handle.  Now include the four biopsies, breast MRI, and consultations with doctors to that mix and I'd already be way over my head without even having the surgery!

I am also lucky that my breast cancer is located in one of my milk ducts.  If it wasn't, I'd still be living blissfully unaware of anything wrong, waiting to turn 40 so I can get my first mammogram covered under my health insurance.  But, I was "lucky", and the cancer was causing something obviously strange to happen that tipped me off.  My cancer is millimeters in size.  MILLIMETERS!  You can't even feel it.  Who knows if I'd ever have felt it if it was located somewhere else, perhaps in the back of my breast, closer to my lymph nodes.

And this is one of the many things that pisses me off about my situation.  Not one single OBGYN told me that if I took the genetic test, and tested positive, I could have been getting regular mammograms at the age of 25.  Wouldn't a doctor look at my family history and recommend this to me?  It took something to be physically wrong with me for the insurance company to say, fine, yes, I guess she does need a mammogram, we will allow it.  I also believed that, "oh when you are younger nothing will show up on the mammogram because your breasts are so dense."  LIES!  ALL LIES!!  I looked at my mammogram, I could see everything clear as day, don't give me that lame excuse that I believed for so long.

If I am not living proof that mammograms and early detection is key, I don't know what is!  And now Susan G. Komen is pulling funding from an organization that provides free breast exams to low income women?!  This boggles my mind and makes me fume!  Everyone has a right to keep on top of their health, and it is important to do so.  It shouldn't take something to go horribly wrong in your body for you to figure out you have cancer.  Early detection saves lives, and let's not ever, EVER forget that.

And I'm just going to say thanks to someecards for putting exactly what I was thinking in to card form -

- J.