Breast Cancer Risk Factors Quotes

If only there was a vaccine to protect against breast cancer, we'd be lining up - wouldn't we?

I had breast cancer. Yeah, I know it's scary.

In mid-July 2007, after a routine mammogram, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. As cancer diagnoses go, mine wasn't particularly scary. The affected area was small, and the surgeon seemed to think that a lumpectomy followed by radiation would eradicate the cancerous tissue.

Although it happens more rarely in men, breast cancer is not gender-specific. I was in Costa Rica, and in the shower I felt this lump under my left nipple. It was very small, mind you, but enough to make me call my doctor.

It wasn't until after the reduction that in the lab work, the pathology, that they found that I had DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ) in my left breast. I was very, very lucky because DCIS is basically stage-zero cancer. So I was very lucky.

I have talked to women who do yoga, who are vegan, who have never smoked and/or never drank a day in their life, but they have Stage IV breast cancer. So you do what you can to be as healthy as you can if you know you're high-risk because yes, all those things can factor into that. But sometimes it's just a fluke.

I have to admit, like so many women, I always knew there was a chance. But like so many women, I never thought it would be me. I never thought I'd hear those devastating words: 'You have breast cancer.'

I have always had dense, cyst-prone breasts, so I didn't think much of it when my OB/GYN discovered a lump on a routine physical exam in August of 2006. 'It's a cyst,' she assured me, and I believed her. Several weeks after, I had a negative mammogram, which should have reassured me. Only something felt wrong about this particular lump.

People used to say everyone knows someone who's had breast cancer. In the past few weeks, I've learned something else: Everyone has someone close to them who has had breast cancer.

There are a lot of people who don't know what metastatic breast cancer is.