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.

[Andrea Barnett Budin]

Yes, Brenda, it's interesting. I had a clean mammog in August and noticed the sponginess around Nov but because it wasn't *a lump*, more like a genl hardness of the entire breast, I figured -- another annoying thing about my body as I had just turned 50. After a few mnths it occurred to me that that breast seemed a bit larger than the other. Was it my imagination?, I wondered. Was it a muscular thing?, I hypothesized. I was spending the winter in Boca and decided that as soon as I returned to NY I'd move my next mammog up. As I returned, I noted that I could actually put my hand around this large hardness within my breast and move it! I became alarmed. I decided it must be a cyst or something weird and that I'd likely need a breast surgeon. I began collecting names from my friends w/the cystic breasts that went regularly to have things biopsied and removed. I called my GYN. I scheduled a mammog.

My younger dghtr graduated from Law School, we had the graduation at Lincoln Center in Manhattan and celebrated w/family. (My older dghtr had graduated Law School the yr before and her husband was finishing his residency in OB/GYN.) I also put my house on the market and sold it in 10 days and found a new house closer to the city where my husband worked and we signed two contracts the day before I was diagnosed. Life was so sweet. And then...

Brenda, you had such traumas going on in your life! I am so sorry.

I have of course warned my dghtrs, and every one I know, about finding anything different in or about their breast and moving on it immediately. Don't you beat yourself up because you didn't know. That's not the message transmitted to the public.

Lobular bc is rare and a radiologist that I adore told me that it is a radiologist's worst nightmare. It hides. You can't see it in a mammog. You don't really feel it. And when it becomes blatant, it is huge, and very advanced. In '95 they didn't test for the HER2 gene. So I didn't know. I wasn't expecting a recurrence. Who is? But had I known, I would have been better prepared I think. I was blown away w/the second dx, yet handled the first w/amazing strength and resolve. It took me a while to gain my footing again (along w/Zoloft and Ativan to help me sleep and One Day My Soul Just Opened Up by Iyanla Vanzant, lots of Wayne Dyer's books, Seat of the Soul, etc.). I got out of my head and into my Essence, and that changed everything. I pray you will be DANCING WITH NED and for many decades to come. As my breast surgeon said when I told him my *expectation* -- There's no reason to believe otherwise! (He's a very up man.) And, I have learned, EXPECTION = YOUR REALIY. So, Brenda, you gotta BELIEVE!

HUGS,
Andi