Self-exam and mammogram saved my life in my 40s

In June 1991, I found a lump in my left breast. I found it in the shower while performing a self-examination of my breasts, following the instructions on the little plastic card that hung from the shower rod. The lump was easy to find. It hurt. I called our family physician.

"Thank God," he said. "If it hurts, it can't be breast cancer."

I didn't know this was a myth and, obviously, neither did my doctor. Nor did I know that many, many women find their own breast cancers. And so I did not listen to my body, which was trying to tell me something.

Six months later, a friend asked me to speak at a fundraiser for breast cancer research. I said I would, although I didn't know much about the disease; I never had covered a story about it, and no one in my family had had it, a statement my daughter and granddaughter cannot make.

In preparation for the fundraiser, I began to read about breast cancer, and, wondering about the lump that hurt and therefore could not be cancer, I decided to go for a mammogram after all, something I rarely had bothered to do because there were all these rumors about the harm of exposing yourself to too many X-rays, and, well, I was lazy. The mammogram showed a big fat tumor in one breast and a pre-cancerous condition in the other. In February 1992, I lost both my breasts and all my hair. My hair grew back.

I was 47 years old.

Nearly 18 years later, I still consider the trade of my breasts for my life to have been a fair one, and I know I survived in large part because of (relatively) early detection. Put another way: a breast self-examination and a mammogram — in my 40s.

I am not alone. Many thousands of us will tell you they are alive today because they followed those little self-examination charts, or had routine mammograms, or both — in their 40s.

Cut to 2009 and the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, a government-appointed entity that, in its new guidelines, tells us that women need not get regular mammograms until they're 50 and older — and that those specific self-exam instructions are no longer recommended. Of course they have a study to back this up, a piece of information that always reminds me of the fellow who said Washington will spend $5 million on a study to prove a jackass has three ears, if three ears is what politicians need for a jackass to have. Are these new guidelines a push to ration health care in a time of increasingly unsustainable health care spending? Only a fool would completely discard such a notion.

Then again, maybe it's not politics. Maybe it's just whatever the opposite of common sense is.