October is a favorite month for many people because of the beautiful weather, changing of the seasons, football games, and Halloween festivities. We see green, orange, yellow, and brown colors galore during this season, in addition to the color pink. Many people, including athletes, honor Breast Cancer survivors and fighters by wearing pink throughout the month. The support is wonderful and brings awareness to the horrible disease, however, it is essential to remember that Breast Cancer should be thought about during the other 11 months of the year. Like most people, I have lost members of my family due to the disease and it is extremely difficult to comprehend how Cancer could affect the strongest women (and men) in our lives.
As a future teacher, I will obviously be educating my students every day that they enter through my classroom door. However, there is an unconventional topic that I would like to educate them on as well. Self- breast exams.
To my future students,
I would like to talk to you about exams, go figure because I am a teacher. I know this word makes you all cringe because we associate it with studying and anxiety. I get it, I really do. You all have busy schedules and lives outside of the four, cinderblock walls of my classroom. However, I am not talking about a fifty-question test on the generals and battlefields of the World Wars or regurgitating every word I said during the Holocaust unit for a five paragraph essay. The exam I want to talk to you about is not one that you can study for during morning homeroom. Honestly, I care more about you passing this exam than any exam you will ever take in my classroom. The exam that I am talking about is called a self-breast exam. I am sure this topic is not one that you expect to discuss with your social studies teacher. However, I want to spread awareness of how this exam can change, and ultimately, save your lives.
I want to share a story with you about a sixteen-year-old girl I knew. Let’s call her Mary. Mary was very active in the school community, similarly to many of you. She worked at the local retirement home and babysat her neighbors during her days off from work. Mary was an active member in multiple clubs at her high school and was involved with the Relay for Life. She had many friends and came from a large, supportive family. Mary sounds like many of your fellow classmates, right? Here is where her story becomes unique. Mary’s pediatrician taught her and her older sister how to perform self-exams during a wellness visit in August of 2011. Mary had just turned sixteen and did not have a care in the world. She listened to the doctor’s directions and performed the exams weekly. A month later, Mary was performing the exam during her nightly shower and felt a bump. Her heart raced and her hands began to shake. How did this bump suddenly emerge? She could not see it, but she could feel it on the outside of her left breast. Mary quickly finished her shower and got dressed into her pajamas. She walked into her parents’ bedroom and told them what she had found. Mary’s mother, Margaret, said that Mary was just being dramatic and to go to bed. It was her step-father, Dave, who insisted for Margaret to go into Mary’s room and see what she found. Mary explained to her mom what she felt and Margaret touched the area and was visibly upset by what she felt on her sixteen-year-old daughter’s body. Margaret made an appointment, with the pediatrician, for the next afternoon. The pediatrician was very surprised to know that Mary was performing the exams, let alone had actually found a lump. The pediatrician said that it felt like a Fibroadenoma, a benign tumor. Mary and Margaret began researching and figuring out why Mary had this lump. They did not find any answers.
The next couple of months were filled with a gynecologist appointment, numerous ultrasounds, meetings with a surgeon, and lots of worrying. The doctors said to wait six months to see if the benign tumor would go away…it did not. Six months from the finding of the tumor in September, the lump grew from two centimeters to four centimeters, which was surprising to the surgeon. It was March of Mary’s junior year when college tours, SATs, and Prom dates and dresses were the main concerns for all of her classmates. The surgeon scheduled a lumpectomy, surgery in which only the tumor and some surrounding tissue are removed (breastcacner.org). It was her first surgery and the only thing that kept Mary calm was listening to “I Have Confidence” sung by her favorite actress, Julie Andrews, in her favorite movie, The Sound of Music. That song played over and over in her head until Thursday, April 26, 2012: the day of her lumpectomy. The surgery went well and the surgeon stated that the pathology report showed no signs of cancer, and the sixteen-year-old would not have to worry about a reoccurrence. Mary was able to go back to doing typical teenage things, like preparing for her Junior Prom which was two weeks after the surgery. But of course, that is not the end of Mary’s story.
Fast forward to the fall of 2012, Mary found a second lump in the same area as the first tumor. Mary’s parents were horrified and brought her directly to the surgeon. The surgeon was unavailable so they went to his partner. This surgeon did not feel anything in the now seventeen-year-old and told Margaret that everything was fine. Mary’s mother followed her intuition and scheduled an ultrasound appointment for her daughter. Sure enough, a small lump was seen on the ultrasound screen. It was said to be a second Fibroadenoma. Back to the surgeon Margaret, Mary, and Mary’s father, Tommy, went and explained what the ultrasound showed. The surgeon from the first surgery did feel a small lump and, again, made the family wait six months to see if the lump would go away. Mary felt internal pain from the incision area and it was very uncomfortable during the waiting period. Six months later was March of 2013, and Mary was preparing to travel to Paris and London with her school choir. An ultrasound showed a small Fibroadenoma and the surgeon wanted to have a speedy lumpectomy in the weeks following that appointment. Margaret asked to wait until June, after Mary’s graduation and the end of the school year festivities. The surgeon agreed, and the second surgery was scheduled for June 24th, 2013. The recovery was a little more painful, but the surgeon was able to use the incision from the first surgery. The family hoped and prayed for no more surgeries for Mary.
October of 2013 was the beginning of Mary’s first semester at West Chester University. She was there to study education, and she was adjusting well to the new, college lifestyle. Mary was in a shower stall in her new home, Goshen Hall, when she performed a routine self-exam. Tears filled her eyes when she felt a THIRD lump. It had to be her imagination. How could a third lump have formed? Mary called her parents the next morning to share her concerns. Margaret was calm and supportive for her daughter’s sake, and Tommy was extremely angry with the situation. He started calling friends and relatives for suggestions on the top surgeons in the Philadelphia area. Tommy scheduled an appointment for Black Friday with a top surgeon at Fox Chase Cancer Center. The surgeon’s name was Paul Cricillo, and he and his team discussed Mary’s medical history before she arrived for an ultrasound. The team determined that Mary had been misdiagnosed this whole time. The lumps were not benign, fibrous tumors. They originated from the same lump, which was actually a Phyllodes tumor. Phyllodes tumors are either: benign (not cancerous), some are malignant (cancerous) and some are borderline (in between noncancerous and cancerous) (BreastCancer.org). Mary’s would have turned malignant if it had not been found so quickly in 2011. The first self-exam saved her life and prevented the tumor from becoming cancerous. Bloodwork was taken, and a date was immediately set to take out the small lump and the remaining tissue. On December 30th, 2013, the now eighteen-year-old, Mary was taken in for her third surgery, this time at Fox Chase Cancer Center. The pathologists found there to be no sign of cancer after the surgery was completed. Mary will return for annual examinations for the rest of her life, to ensure her body is healthy. Genetic testing was completed in May of 2014 to determine if she had any of the three, Cancer genes that would have contributed to her tumor. The results showed that she did not have the genes they tested for, and that was a huge relief to Mary and her family.
The self-breast exams that Mary performed ultimately saved her from being diagnosed with breast cancer at a young age. I know because I am the girl in the story. I was the young girl that found the three lumps that turned my life upside-down for many years. If it were not for my pediatrician teaching my sister, Courtney, and I how to perform self-exams, I do not know what would have happened to me. That is why I choose to share my story and to promote self-exams for young women. I want you to all be aware that these misfortunes can happen to you. Please do not have the “it won’t happen to me, I’m too young,” mentality. Breast Cancer does not discriminate. Most medical websites including the American Cancer Society and BreastCancer.org, tell women to start doing exams in their early twenties, but I disagree. What would have happened if I waited four years until performing my first exam? The important thing to remember is know your body and know the resources that are available if you do find something.
All I ask of you, my students, is to talk with your mothers, sisters, aunts, friends, neighbors, and mentors about self-exams. I do not want any of you or your loved ones to go through what I did, or what breast cancer survivors go through on a daily basis.
With hope for a cure,
Miss McDade
