Checking Your Boobies!

When I - or should I say my hubby - found the lump in my left breast I’d just turned 43 and it was almost 3cm in size. 43 is young, but there are plenty who are younger than I was. 

Regular mammograms start at 50 years old. I was really angry when I thought about it. Under 50s are on their own to recognise any changes to their breasts. They haven't got the “backup” or piece of mind of mammograms. I started to look into it. Mammograms aren't offered to under 50s as younger breasts are more dense and do not always show the full picture under this type of examination. But there needs to be a way for the under 50s to be tested. There are so many of us!

Following my diagnosis I’ll have mammograms yearly for 10 years. At 44, I had my first routine mammogram. It was on the exact anniversary of my diagnosis day. Just that thought alone made me feel sick to my stomach. It made me wonder if those that decided an exact year from diagnosis to have your annual check up would realise just how triggering it is. To go back to the hospital where you heard those three words that changed your life forever… It's breast cancer. I know it needs to be as close to a year as possible but it was just unfortunate for me on how the once a week screening fell on my exact anniversary date.

Two Years On From The Start Of It All

When the second year was coming around I'd decided to put a post on social media. I realised that unless you’d had a scare or a diagnosis or were 50, you wouldn’t necessarily know what having a mammogram would be like. My mum had told me it was like squishing your boob between two baking trays! Not far from the truth to be fair!

A few months before my second annual check up, I’d started to feel a change in some tissue in my left breast. I’d started to have a good feel of my boob every week rather than sticking to my motto of “feel it on the 1st”. This is a reminder I (among so many others) like to put out there at the 1st of every month to feel your chest, look for changes and get checked out if there is something you think is different to your normal - because everybody’s normal is different. I knew that I could call the breast care nurses at North Manchester Hospital as they are on hand for you to refer yourself back to them if you have been in their care before. So that's what I did.

I saw the breast care nurse. I told her I was going to wait for my routine mammogram, but what a hypocrite I would be for promoting checking your chest and getting anything unusual checked out if I didn't do it myself. So that was why I was there. I was bricking it - to put it lightly.

She examined me and said she could feel what I was feeling and that she would arrange a mammogram and ultrasound. I'd felt sick for months thinking I don't want to find out because I can't put my family through this again....

She booked me in for a mammogram and ultrasound. It was just regular tissue. It is my normal boob following surgery! 2 years on who would've thought that my boobs would still be settling from surgery, but they were. I have a little pocket of fluid near my actual scar, but that is quite normal too, and nothing to worry about.

The moral of my story is to find YOUR normal and get checked out if you feel or see changes. I have worried for months for nothing.  In the words of Amy Dowden (Strictly Come Dancing Dancer and fellow Breast Cancer Survivor), “if you're not checking... who is?"

Sending lots of love to those finding differences, being diagnosed, going through treatment, survivors and families and friends of those who didn't .

JuJu x