When the COVID-19 pandemic took over the world, a lot of us were reluctant to leave home. That meant we didn’t do many of the things we used to do regularly.
Sadly, one of those “regular” things was to go to the doctor for routine screenings.
Now that we’ve managed to make it to a relative “new normal” as far as COVID-19 goes, we’re slowly finding our way back to doctors’ offices. If you’ve tried to get an appointment recently, you know that it can be difficult.
Still, it’s essential that women 50 and over get their mammograms every two years, according to the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force.
However, a report by the Journal of the National Cancer Institute found that mammograms dropped by as much as 80% during parts of the pandemic. According to the American Association of Cancer research, more than 10 million breast cancer screenings were missed in 2020.
As a result, there will be a projected 2,487 additional deaths from breast cancer through 2030.
Screenings really can save lives.
As someone who is in the fourth year of a five-year treatment for breast cancer, I can attest to that.
When my mother who had dementia came to live with me in 2014, I had just started to get mammograms, though in a willy-nilly, when-I-thought-about-it fashion. They always came back negative, so I wasn’t too worried. After all, there wasn’t any breast cancer in my family history.
Mom’s care, and then my husband’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis a year later, meant that my own health went to the back burner. After my mother died in 2018, I vowed to do better, but life has a way of getting in the way of my plans.
Then came the day in spring 2019 when my health came to the forefront. I had to make an emergency trip to the doctor. When the nurse practitioner asked me if I knew I had a lump on my right breast, I scarcely heard her. No, I had no idea there was something there. Really?
That day set in motion a whirlwind of tests for the problem I went to the doctor for, as well as for breast cancer.
A few weeks later, when the results of an ultrasound pointed to malignancy, I knew that I’d never again be able to put off getting my screenings.
Still more tests found that my left breast might also have cancer, so it was decided that I’d have a double lumpectomy to remove the tumor in my right breast, a couple of lymph nodes to see if anything had spread, and to figure out what was happening in my left breast.
Happily, I found out that my cancer wasn’t a fast-growing one, so I was able to skip chemotherapy and instead went through a few weeks of radiation therapy.
That all happened in 2019.
Now, I’m in the fourth year of monthly shots and daily pills to suppress my estrogen, which was found to be feeding my cancer.
All through the pandemic, even at the scariest times of it, I had to go to my oncologist’s office each month. I wasn’t able to skip any mammograms or MRIs or anything else that my cancer team determined I needed to do. Of course, every time I left my house, I was worried that I’d be bringing COVID-19 home to my husband, who at that point still could stay home alone.
To this day, I’m struck by the fact that my cancer was found almost by accident. Had I not been in a panic state for something else, I might have waited even longer to get back into the swing of my routine screenings.
Who knows how much bigger that tumor would have been? Really, it could have been so much worse.
That’s why during October, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I try to encourage all the women in my life to go get that mammogram. It’s not nearly as bad as I feared, it doesn’t take that long, and it’s so much better to catch something early than to wait until there’s a more serious problem.
Procrastination could have put me out of commission.
Don’t let that happen to you.
• Joan Oliver is the former Northwest Herald assistant news editor. She has been associated with the Northwest Herald since 1990. She can be reached at jolivercolumn@gmail.com.
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