This article was written for Annabel & Grace, which is now part of Rest Less.
After a fantastic Sunday lunch with friends the other day, our hostess drew me aside and said she wanted to ask my advice about something. She is just over 50 and had received her first appointment to have a mammogram.
So I chatted away about my experiences of the breast screening procedure and then added that it helps if you ask the technician to squeeze the perspex plates slowly as it is less uncomfortable.
All well and good replied my friend. But she wasn’t as much interested in how a mammogram is done, more about what was contained in the leaflet that came with her appointment letter. She had highlighted several sentences in yellow fluorescent pen.
I am one of those people who never reads the rules of a board game. Similarly, I rather naively perhaps trust in the NHS and if an appointment is given to me for any regular check up – a mammogram, a smear test – I just put the date in my diary and trot along. But am I foolish to do that? Without looking into the statistics and issues surrounding some of our everyday medical procedures?
My friend’s point of view
As soon as I reached 51 every medical professional I seemed to see asked me if I had received my first mammogram invitation. When I said that I hadn’t, their reaction was that I must, must chase this up! I didn’t at the time as I thought I would wait and see for another six months but within a couple of months it arrived on the mat – funnily enough within the same week as my invitation for my Cervical Smear Test – it was my lucky week!
Sitting down with a cup of tea I thought I would have a good read of the leaflet. It sets out the choices before you and the risks of breast screening and says “Some women will be diagnosed and treated for breast cancer that would never otherwise have been found and would not have become life-threatening. This is the main risk of screening. Doctors cannot always tell whether a breast cancer that is diagnosed will go on to be life-threatening or not so they offer treatment to all women with breast cancer. This means that some women will be offered treatment that they do not need.”
About 3 in every 200 women screened are therefore diagnosed with a cancer that would never have become life threatening and this adds up to 4000 women a year. Overall, for every 1 woman who has her life saved from breast cancer, about 3 women are diagnosed with a cancer that would never have become life threatening and researchers are trying to find better ways to tell which women have breast cancers that will be life threatening and those which wouldn’t.
I have to say that I found this quite an alarming statistic and then I turned to Google!! There was an interesting article written by a doctor at The Harvard Medical School which discusses the issue and it didn’t help dispel my fears. I completely understand that a mammogram could save my life but likewise I’m very concerned about the risk of having a cancer that would never cause me any harm. To have to deal with the worry in the first instance, and then treatment – which we well know isn’t something you want to be going through unnecessarily – is not something anyone wants to face. I feel the medical world simply still doesn’t know enough about it.
As for my own decision as to whether to have one or not – my mother and my sister have both told me they will frog march me down there to have one. And my friends feel very strongly that I should do too – so I will go and have it done but I’m very, very nervous about it!
My most recent experience
Oddly enough, my mammogram appointment arrived just a few days after discussing the issue with my friend. As usual it was done in a mobile unit in our local library car park; I didn’t have to wait long and – best of all – I hardly felt a thing. Unlike a lady who, a few weeks before, moved to the back of the tiny room where she was having her mammogram to let the mammographer past, only to find that she was leaning on an emergency door which unexpectedly opened and she fell out onto the tarmac below. Ouch!
While I was having my mammogram, I asked why the NHS don’t offer appointments after 71 (more accurately 70 years and 10 months according to her). The mammographer told me it was a) funding and b) older women tend to die of something other than breast cancer after they reach their seventh decade. So if you are 68, you have to contact the NHS every three years – they won’t contact you. She said that one older lady had refused mammograms all of her life because she was concerned about the exposure to the x rays but apparently they are very weak and don’t do us any harm.
How to check your breasts guide CLICK HERE