To Andrea- about sponginess

[Brenda_D]

I read your story and was surprised when you said your first sign was a "dense sponge" feeling in your breast.

My Mom passed last year in Sept, after a year long illness.
My sisters and I had been her caregivers, and it had been a very intense year. Even so, I'd had a diagnostic mammogram in May because of an area of dense tissue found on a mammo 6 months prior.
That mammo came back as normal, so I didn't think much more about it.
Shortly after Mom passed, and just a few weeks after we had cleaned out her apartment, my brother's son passed away. So needless to say, we were in a lot of turmoil and I had little time to think of myself. During that time I brushed a hand over my breast and noticed an area that felt like a dense sponge! At that point I thought, no worries, I had just had a clean mammo 5 months earlier and after all, had some lumpiness in my breasts as I aged.
Well, a month later I found a large lump in that breast where the sponginess was. Although mine turned out to be IDC, it struck me that we had both felt something similar.
For awhile it bothered me that I had felt that in Oct and had done nothing about it at the time. But I know I can't beat myself up about it, and my outcome probably wouldn't have changed since I found the BC a month later.