Life: Stories by Isha

Yes. This is it. This is the reason Breast Cancer is  suddenly  so important to me. * * * After our son arrived in January 2018, we noticed that my breast milk was bloody. My doctors and Dr. Google advised that we monitor for a while, as it was possible that my milk ducts were acting funky from being awakened for the first time. I wasn't feeling any pain and the breast milk wasn't poisoned or bad, so I  forgot about it  monitored for a while, as advised.  In April of the same year, we decided to speak to a general surgeon, as the bleeding hadn't stopped. The surgeon did a physical breast exam and ordered a mammogram. These two tests didn't show any problems, so life continued as usual. It so happened that the bleeding stopped almost immediately after the mammogram, so as far as we were concerned, everything was fine. I had been doing physical breast exams for a very long time, so I continued these without really expecting to find anything...

Sorry people, I'm bad at this.  I will get better at this. I will set posting reminders going forward. Today, I am sharing what I know about breast screening. Who : I think this is the most difficult question to answer because even the medical experts have differing opinions. What we knew before was that, generally, people younger than 40 didn't need to get screened. Now, we have 20 and 30 yr olds being diagnosed and treated for breast cancer - I'm only  33. I think the safest thing for people to do is start checking their breasts now, no matter the age. We never pray for breast cancer but not knowing is way more dangerous. Why : I've heard people say of breast cancer screening - " you will find what you're looking for ". I think that's a very simple mindset. Not all boobs are alike; some people have lumpy breasts on a good day. Some breasts get lumpy around periods. Some nipples are normally inverted; some are always hard... I always tell peopl...

Breast Cancer is a cancer of the breast. That's it. I guess the real question is - what is cancer? In lay terms, cancer is something that is growing where it doesn't belong. More accurately, cancer is a disease that causes 'bad' cells to multiply rapidly, invading the space of the good cells, and overpowering the 'soldiers' that our bodies are normally equipped to fight disease with. Image source: Google One may say breast cancer is one of the better kinds of cancer because detection is more straightforward than with leukemia, for example, as in most cases, changes in breast tissue can be noticed. As with most cancers, breast cancer is diagnosed based on how much the disease has grown/spread, from Stages 0 to 4(IV). Stage 0 is also known as DCIS ( ductal carcinoma in situ - which loosely means that the cancer is small, still in the original place where it occurred and hasn't spread); Stage IV refers to cancers that are large and have metas...