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My Breast Cancer All but Announced Itself
Sometimes a cancer diagnosis begins at the doctor’s office. Kate Pickert’s started with a mystery.
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.
