My Breast Cancer All but Announced Itself
Sometimes a cancer diagnosis begins at the doctor’s office. Kate Pickert’s started with a mystery.
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A cancer diagnosis does not usually happen all at once. Rather than a single somber conversation with an oncologist, a patient generally learns the truth through a trickle of test results and expert opinions. Sometimes, it starts with a mystery: a cough that won’t go away. An upset stomach. A funny-looking freckle. A lump found in the shower. I never felt a lump, nor did any of the highly qualified breast cancer doctors who examined me. The reason I found myself being squeezed and palpated by these doctors was that my breast cancer had announced its presence all on its own. It had started oozing.
Breasts are never really the same after you’ve used them to nourish a child. In the summer of 2014, two years after I had stopped nursing my daughter Evie, my left nipple began occasionally discharging a yellowish substance. I was not particularly alarmed. I looked up reliable medical studies online and learned that, while this oddity could point to breast cancer, nine times out of 10 such discharge was caused by a benign condition. As a health care journalist, I found this statistic reassuring. In my mind, if there was only a small chance something could occur, it would not occur.
To me, the goo oozing from my nipple was annoying but nothing to panic about. I was only 35, after all. My husband Collin felt differently. Both his maternal grandmother and an aunt had died young of breast cancer. He urged me to get checked out.
Eventually, I booked an appointment with an internist at the University of California, Los Angeles. During the exam, I brought up the nipple discharge, which had recently turned a darker brown. The doctor’s eyes widened. She assured me that it was probably nothing but referred me to a breast surgeon, who ordered an ultrasound. A few days later, a technician chatted with me as she moved a small wand across the front of my left breast. I was relaxed during the exam, but when she left the room, I felt a wave of terror. Was it possible I actually had breast cancer? When the technician returned, she said everything looked good but that I should call the office for the final results in a few days. I felt…
