Your doctor’s office calls.
Your test results are back.
The voice on the other end of the phone says, “We’d like to have you come in as soon as possible.”
Many months later — after surgery, after radiation, after much worry — your doctor says, “Things look good, but we’d like to see you every six months for awhile.”
This is one of the happier-ending stories of someone who had herself checked regularly for signs of breast cancer. Many other stories do not turn out as well, in part, because both men and women aren’t checked regularly — by a doctor or by themselves.
October is Breast Cancer Awareness month. It is a time set aside to remind us that early detection and treatment are key to survival.
According to the American Cancer Society (http://tinyurl.com/facts-cancer):
■ The breast cancer mortality rate has decreased since 1989, with larger decreases in women younger than 50. The decline is attributed to earlier detection, improved treatments, and possibly, decreased incidence as a result of declining use of postmenopausal hormone therapy.
■ When detected and treated early, 5-year relative survival for localized breast cancer is 98 percent. For regional disease, it is 84 percent. If the cancer has spread to distant organs, 5-year survival drops to 24 percent. Larger tumor size at diagnosis is also associated with decreased survival.
Of course there are those in denial. “It won’t happen to me, just someone else.”
That “someone else” mentality may help you sleep at night. But just ask that “someone else” who has been diagnosed with breast cancer. It is amazing how your eyes open and you start to see the many others fighting the disease, after you or a loved one have become one of the many needing treatment.
As far as women are concerned, about 1 in 8 (just under 12 percent) U.S. women will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime, reports the American Cancer Society.
Many more will develop less serious signs, which if treated early may never become invasive.
For women in the U.S., breast cancer death rates are higher than those for any other cancers, besides lung cancer.
A woman’s risk of breast cancer approximately doubles if she has a first-degree relative (mother, sister, daughter) who has been diagnosed with breast cancer. About 15 percent of women who get breast cancer have a family member diagnosed with it.
And while women are more likely to get breast cancer, men are not immune. About 2,240 new cases of invasive breast cancer were expected to be diagnosed in men in 2013. A man’s lifetime risk of breast cancer is about 1 in 1,000.
Some resist getting checked for breast cancer because of old stereotypes. There was a time when women frequently opted for radical mastectomies (the entire removal of a breast) rather than take any chances once cancer was detected. Today, the need to go that route is far less. Limited surgery and localized radiation have made the lives of cancer patients much more manageable.
For some patients radiation can be targeted by small pellets inserted in the breast for a few minutes twice a day for a week. This takes the place of treatments which expose more of the body to radiation and which may take weeks to administer.
The long and the short of all this is that early detection is critical for survival. And that the tools of that survival are becoming more effective on almost a daily basis.
And for those in the Seacoast there is even less reason to avoid getting a physical with cancer centers located at the hospitals in Dover, Rochester, Portsmouth and York, Maine.