Patricia Prijatel

I have been felt up by two different doctors, had a mammogram and blood tests, plus an overall physical. No signs of cancer. Yea!!!!!!!!!! The mammo technician, though, gave me a scare, saying I have calcifications on the breast that had the cancer and doctors have been watching them because they can be a sign of early cancer. “Oh, great,” I thought. I asked my surgeon who explained that I do, in fact, have calcifications in my affected breast, caused by the trauma it has gone through. “Most of the women I see have calcifications,” he said. Mine are dispersed and stable–they have not changed in four years. Most important, they are not clustered. Clustered calcifications can be a sign of early cancer. According to my surgeon, though, they lead to cancer about five percent of the time, which means even if mine were micros, I still had a 95 percent chance they were not cancerous. Why did the tech mention that and why did she mention it the way she did? I swear, people need to think before they speak far more often than they do.