Do YOU know your breast category?

What still blows my mind is that I made it into my 40s without ever hearing anything about breast density.

My story started during a routine physical when the doctor massaged my left breast and said, “We could say this might be something… that’ll at least get you in for a mammogram. I like all my women over 40 to have one.”

She wasn’t even convinced she felt anything. She just wanted me screened because I had just turned 41 and she didn’t want “the system” hassling her.

Her improv saved my life.

And the irony of it all is this:
The referral was for my left breast.
Cancer turned up in my right.

I was sent for my very first mammogram on my left breast only, and I remember thinking it was strange to only image one breast. I learned that breast density is categorized on a continuum from fatty to extremely dense — and the denser the breast, the trickier it is to see cancer. I fell into the “extremely dense” category, which earned me a golden ticket to get a mammogram on my right breast two weeks later. Without that one off-hand referral, I would never have known any of this.

One year later, I felt a “lump.”

Except it didn’t feel like a lump at all.
Honestly, it felt like a rib — long, hard, cylindrical — right where my breast meets my sternum.

I wasn’t worried. I was totally confident it was some weird cyst. A “welcome” gift to complement the other lumps and bumps I was acquiring on my entrance into middle age. I had no first-degree relatives with breast cancer, and although not perfect, I subscribed to a pretty healthy lifestyle. Cancer was in no way on my radar.

The lump seemed to come out of nowhere, and had its size not been so impressive, I likely would have ignored it. I went for a mammogram and ultrasound, and they told me right then I would be moving on to a biopsy.

I didn’t even enjoy touching it; it weirded me out. It wasn’t until my mom asked me about it that I got curious in the shower. Raising my right arm over my head, I felt deeper around my breast, really getting in there… and there it was: a second lump opposite the first.
The kind we’re all taught to look for — round, gumball-like, in the fullness of the breast — the classic sign no one wants to find.

At the biopsy appointment, the radiologist introduced herself and asked kindly, “Have you met your care team yet?”

I laughed: “Oh no, I’m just here for a biopsy.”
She stared at me for a moment too long — a look I recognized from my days in corporate. Someone, clearly, had dropped the ball.

After she sampled both lumps, she showed me my mammogram and ultrasound report. At the top, in all caps, it read:

“PLEASE BRING TO THE ATTENTION OF THE REFERRING PHYSICIAN/PRACTITIONER.”

Then she scrolled to the part that said:

“This imaging result indicates a high probability of malignancy. Even if this biopsy is negative, further evaluation by a Breast Surgeon is required. The Calgary Breast Health Program has been notified. Please make an immediate referral.”

“You’d better call your clinic and see how that referral is going.”
Gotcha.

What’s funny is I STILL walked out of there convinced it wasn’t going to be anything.

But as the week dragged on with no results, I became anxious. I recalled a nurse mentioning something about a health portal, so I figured I’d poke around and see what was in there.

There, plain as day, sat my results… which had been posted the same day as my biopsy a week prior.

No one had called me.

I scanned through the medical jargon, and then I found it:

Pathology Results: Invasive breast carcinoma with lobular features.

“I don’t know what this means!!! Is this what you had?” I needed to call it in and phone a friend…one who knew cancer. My girlfriend Krissy carries the BRCA1 gene (a mutation that raises lifetime breast cancer risk) and was diagnosed in 2020. Five years later, she’s owning her survivorship — and now she was guiding me into mine.

Sitting on the sofa with my husband beside me and Krissy on speakerphone, I did what most women do in today’s tech landscape — I copied the text into ChatGPT and asked it to translate the medical jargon into plain speak.

Yep. ChatGPT told me I had cancer.

And honestly, I’m grateful for it.

Some people believe patients shouldn’t have immediate access to results, but receiving this news in the comfort of my home, with people I love, was 100x better than sitting in a cold, sterile clinic with the doctor who had missed my referral and then read the results verbatim from the portal. Needless to say, I got a new doctor immediately.

Standing on the other side of everything, I can say the waiting game in Cancerland is brutal — but dealing with other people’s emotions about my diagnosis was harder. I was present to a lot of fear and a lot of love. I was grateful for my meditation practice and began to notice that people were mostly reacting from their own relationship to mortality. It’s funny how people act like they have time, but the truth is none of us actually know when our time is up.

Each leg of treatment came with its own discoveries.

I met with my surgical team, who were confident they could get everything with a mastectomy, but seeing other breast cancer patients in the waiting room made everything feel very real.

People love to say, “At least you get a free boob job.”
Even I had soothed myself with the idea of a consolation prize.

But I learned quickly that augmentation and reconstruction are completely different animals.

I chose a DIEP flap reconstruction — a process where my own tissue and blood vessels were used to build a new breast. It’s extremely intensive, a multiple-site surgery lasting eight hours.

Waking up in the cardiovascular ICU, my first words were:
“Did they get all the cancer?”
My second:
“I want to see it.”

When they uncovered the bandages, my body looked like someone had spray-painted “Cancer Was Here!” across my torso.

During surgery, they also sampled lymph nodes, and they, too, had been kissed with cancer. We weren’t done with surgery alone — we were just getting started.

I had a walker, and it took a month and a half to stand up straight again. Recovery demanded a respect for my body I’d never had before. It was incredibly humbling, and I had to develop a new sense of self-compassion.

Throughout appointments, I was constantly asked, “Any relatives with cancer?” And I couldn’t help thinking of my kids. They now had a first-degree relative — what did that mean for them?
We paid for genetic testing, and in true eldest-daughter, hyper-individualist fashion, I learned I got cancer “all by myself.” Ta da! No gene to pass along to family members – getting those results was the best Christmas gift ever.

I began weekly mistletoe IV therapy with my naturopath — a supportive treatment widely used in Europe to help the immune system, ease chemo side effects, and improve energy. With kiddos under 10, life is germy, so I took everything I could to stay strong. (I’m still on the protocol, and to date, I haven’t been sick in a year and a half. I can’t even remember the last time I was sick!)

The New Year brought 8 rounds of chemo over 4 months, with Krissy helping me cold cap to save my hair. I was prepared to lose it, but keeping the hair on my scalp was such a gift — especially since chemo took every other hair on my body. Cold capping was intense and hard work; you absolutely need a buddy system, and there were moments I was ready to give up, but she kept me going. I’m so grateful.

Summer brought 16 rounds of radiation and the inevitable dance with mental health. You never knew what your body was going to decide each day — you were 100% at its mercy. It was the murky intersection between the person you once were and the person you were becoming.

Shamelessly, I found refuge from the monotony of Cancerland by escaping into the world of romantasy. Cancer doesn’t care who you are, what life has already served you, and if you’re a mom… you still have to “mom.” I was grateful for the cognitive offloading it provided. “Only you can decide what breaks you” is a quote from my favourite series, A Court of Thorns and Roses, and it quickly became my motto.

ChatGPT and I continued to develop our relationship — I loved accessing my health information immediately in the MyHealth portal and having Chat interpret everything into plain speak. I could mentally process it, prepare my questions for my care team, and go into my Dr. appointments informed instead of dissociated and overwhelmed.

By fall, I moved to estrogen blockers — given my cancer profile of ER/PR+ and HER2-, I take medication daily and injections every three months, and I’m awaiting an oophorectomy to prevent estrogen from feeding any stray cancer cells.

I didn’t ease into menopause — I swan-dived into it.
No slow ramp-up from peri.
No gentle transition.
Just an abrupt, overnight crash from normal hormone levels to almost nothing.
And my body felt every inch of that freefall.

What a lot of us don’t realize is that estrogen affects:

• joints and lubrication
  • sleep
  • bone density
  • skin elasticity
  • hair texture
  • body temperature
  • mood
  • brain clarity
  • pelvic health

It astounds me how little information women have about their bodies — inside Cancerland and out. I’m grateful for the conversations emerging around peri- and menopause and the promise of new therapies. Unfortunately, for many of them, hormone-sensitive gals like me are not candidates.

I like to think of myself as a scout, raw-dogging the menopause trail so I can come back and tell my girlfriends where the potholes are, what gear you actually need, and how to survive terrain no one warns you about.

And then, just like that, on September 11th — one year from the day I first saw “carcinoma” in my portal — the expectation was that I was cancer-free.
No final scan.
No confetti.
Just the knowledge that treatment had done its job.

It was a stark contrast to the pomp and circumstance of entering Cancerland — so I made my own celebration and added it to the milestone markers I was able to share with family and friends. From the start, I learned you have to make your own joy. Pain was inevitable, but suffering was optional. And I chose to take it ALL in, because this is one place I hope to only visit once.

But survivorship has its own chapters — the quiet ones no one warns you about. It’s where you learn to live in a body forever changed while trusting your instincts in ways you never have before.

Self-advocacy became my lifeline.

It starts with your own body — how it looks, how it feels, what’s normal, what’s not. And truly, women should never feel shame for knowing their bodies — not when society sexualizes us to sell everything from hamburgers to hedge funds.

I once heard that juggling life means knowing that some balls are rubber and some are glass.
Drop a rubber ball and it bounces back.
Drop a glass ball and it may shatter.
In cancer, you will inevitably drop balls — the trick is knowing which ones to drop.

So if you take anything from my story, let it be this:

Dense breasts hide cancer.
Systems make mistakes.
Your body is YOUR business.

XO