Word: breast
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...showed my mammograms to four other radiologists. Excessive, maybe. But one was equivocal, and the other three said they would never have suggested a biopsy. That was reassuring but confusing. The fact remained that a skilled radiologist had raised the specter of breast cancer, and while other doctors saw things differently, I was stuck. No one could undo her written report, not in this litigious age. Meanwhile, the idea that I might have cancer had taken root. I knew that if I didn't have the tissue analyzed by a pathologist, I'd never stop worrying...
Like millions of American women, I go faithfully to the radiologist for my annual mammogram. Unlike most women, I got a bad report last month. Tiny specks in my breast, called calcifications, looked to my radiologist as if they had changed since the last time I was tested. Her recommendation: a procedure called a needle-localized excisional biopsy...
...medical reporter, so I knew what that meant. Guided by X-ray images, a doctor inserts a wire into the breast to target the calcifications. Then a breast surgeon cuts through the skin, finds the wire and fishes out a sample of tissue large enough to capture the problem spot. It needn't be that bad. If I was lucky, the amount of tissue removed would be the size of a large grape...
...wait a minute! A wire through the breast? A scar? A grape? We're talking about my breasts, which I happen to be quite fond of. And given their modest proportions, I hardly had any to spare. Fear and vanity battled for control. Even though 80% of biopsies are benign, I was terrified the doctors would find cancer. I panicked. I wanted another opinion. Lots of other opinions...
...would be a mistake, however, to conclude that raloxifene must be the better drug; the two studies are not directly comparable. The J.A.M.A. study looked at women who had a low risk of developing breast cancer, whereas the tamoxifen experiment was conducted using women who had a high risk of getting the disease. Yet women with a high risk of breast cancer are less likely to develop the kind of estrogen-sensitive tumors that respond to designer estrogens...