Symptoms of Breast Cancer in Women

One of the recognizable symptoms of breast cancer in women is a lump. I was just months after my 40th birthday when I found my lump. I was in the shower washing my armpits and probing the area. The lump was about the size of a pencil eraser. I finished my shower and told myself that it was an ingrown hair and I went to work.

On the drive, I remembered my aunt Lorna telling me the symptoms of breast cancer in women a few years before when she was battling the beast. She made me promise to get a mammogram when I was forty, and I promised because anytime a relative with cancer asks for a promise you gotta give it.
While I was at work, my mind kept going back to that lump. It was a slow day so I had plenty of time to poke at it with my finger and just enough imagination to picture a future in which I was bald because of chemotherapy and my children stood weeping by my bedside.

In an effort to calm my fears, I called my sister (the hypochondriac) and I told her of the lump. She googled symptoms of breast cancer in women, then called my mother and my aunt Lorna and added me to the church prayer list.

Within the next eight hours, I was contacted by numerous people about my lump. Aunt Lorna called and gave me the number of her oncologist and said that she had pulled some strings to get me an emergency mammogram. She told me that lumps weren’t always a death sentence and that in her case, after chemo her hair grew back blond and curly, which is exactly the hair she always wanted.
On the day of the mammogram, my mother insisted upon coming with me. She was being very supportive and also very much like a mother who would have to have security remove her from the room to get her to leave.

The mammogram was no picnic, the worst part was when the tech took a picture and my mother looked at it on the screen and then she gasped and put one hand over her mouth and one over her heart.

The picture was my breast, mostly black but with lines of silver that ran like a river towards my nipple. The tech explained that the silver river was completely normal and several days later my lump was diagnosed as fibroids.

My mother was with me when we got the news and she grasped my hand and said “thank-you Jesus.”
She also said, “You got the fibroid from my side of the family. We all have fibroids, doctor, do you think that is why women in my family have such firm perky boobs?”

My lump story has a very happy ending. My Aunt Lorna’s lump story has months of chemo and radiation and hair loss–but it has a silver lining made out of curly hair. My mother-in-law lost a breast. A friend of mine lost her life.

You should know the symptoms of breast cancer and you should contact a doctor if you find something unusual.

You should also know that sometimes a lump is a just lump.