Feel It on the First!

I usually post to my blogs on Tuesdays, but I saved this week’s post for today! Today is October 1st, kicking off breast cancer awareness month (which I have mixed feelings about but that we’ll talk about later).

As a fit, healthy young woman I always dutifully performed that monthly self-exam because that’s what we’re supposed to do. I felt the lump for months before I said anything. I didn’t want to be that patient who was ringing the alarm over something that was “probably nothing”. I waited until my annual exam and even then, my doctor told me “it’s probably nothing” and I already felt silly. But if you know my story you know by that time, the cancer had already spread to my lymph nodes and it was definitely not “nothing”. But what if I hadn’t known it was there? What if I hadn’t brought it up? What if I had waited for a mammogram? It would have been too late.

So today, I want to remind and encourage you to do that self-check. An easy way to remember is to do it on the first of every month. Know what feels normal and what shouldn’t be there. And if you’ve got that nagging feeling in the back of your mind, don’t wait. Go ahead, be the annoying patient who is asking to check what’s “probably nothing”. It would be better to be annoying than to be diagnosed.

Don’t forget…feel it on the first!