Debbra felt overwhelmed when she was told indirectly that it could be breast cancer.
Transcript
And then all the things lined up and so with the mammogram they’d seen something suspicious and then they sent me for an ultrasound. And I was just lucky that I had a senior ultrasound technician who realized that what she was seeing was just different than what she’s normally used to seeing. She wasn’t seeing a lump because I was diagnosed with mucinous cancer, which is a slimy cancer that sort of spreads and so you don’t get the lump. I did have another component to my cancer but it was a smaller component so it was very, very fortunate that I had an experienced ultrasound person who saw it. Because when I was sent to the breast assessment unit at the hospital, the radiologist at the time was going to try to do a biopsy and when he did the imaging he had a really hard time seeing what she was pointing out on her imaging.
So that’s when I was sent for an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) and then with the MRI lit up, my breast lit up like a light bulb because it was so diverse and so spread out. And then I had to go back for a biopsy and then at that point the radiologist had said, “What we’re doing now is trying to get the best biopsy so we can confirm that it is cancer and you don’t have to go through a surgical biopsy.” To try to miss one step. Which was hard at the time to hear, when you go in, but I sort of had a gut feel that there was something wrong anyhow so I did not know that this was going to happen like this so, I was alone. I didn’t have anybody with me I was just thinking I was going in for a biopsy. So I think that what I learned, is if you start going through this process you should have somebody with you at all times. Because it was really hard when he said, “Now we’re going to try to confirm that it is breast cancer.”
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- * MRI: Imaging test that creates a 3-dimensional picture of the body’s internal structures using magnetic force and radio frequencies.
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