The Lurking Malignancy of Undiagnosed Breast Pain
The mammogram came back clear. So why am I still worried?
“The radiologist said you don’t need to do the ultrasound,” declared the mammography technician with a smile.
After the requisite painful squishes of my left boob into the humming and rotating hard plastic plates of the imaging mammogram machine, she had come back into the room with a satisfied look on her face.
“He said the mass looks stable,” pointing to the indistinct cobweb of the gray-on-black image of the scan on the screen.
Blankly, I asked her, “What does that mean?”
“It means that in the 6 months since your last mammogram, nothing has changed about this tissue in your breast,” she replied. “It hasn’t changed.”
“So why does that part of my boob hurt so much?” was my next question.
“I don’t know. But most women who end up with breast cancer don’t experience pain in that area. So if it hurts, that’s actually a good sign,” she answered with a reassuring tone that somehow felt profoundly unsatisfactory.
“What do I do next?” I queried, reaching for some kind of thing I could do to deal with my painful mystery lump.
Not knowing how to take action was the worst. It had been bugging me for months, and I had finally overcome my fear of accruing more medical debt to get myself into the hospital for the exam.
“Just keep an eye on it, and keep getting regular mammograms,” came the practiced answer.
After the shocking $529 fee I was going to be charged for today’s visit, I thought grumpily, they should have done the ultrasound just because I wanted them to.
Fucking insurance co-pays I grumble to myself. I have never once hit my deductible. Although I am grateful to have the insurance as a backup for real emergencies.
An ultrasound would have at least set my mind at ease.
I wanted to know what was happening to my body. I wondered if I could find a breast specialist to aspirate the lump to see what it actually was. I wondered if I could just trust the medical specialists and sit tight until my next scan.
I wondered if I was panicking for no reason.
I wondered if I was going to die.
3:30 am has definitely become my least favorite time of the day.
When I wake up in the middle of the night, this is when my disaster-mind tends to run wild. It’s also when minor aches and pains in my body turn into overblown monsters that can consume my logical brain with fear.
The stabbing pain in my breast had woken me up again tonight. I had rolled onto my side the wrong way again. And now here I was, awake and writing again. Trying to clear my head of the fear and working to breathe through it.
Frank Herbert wrote Dune back in 1965. The Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear is something I appreciate and use when I’m facing my own fears in everyday life.
I have these two young kids that I love with all my heart. My son is 7 and my daughter is 3. I have an amazing husband. I’m starting to grow my readership on my blog, and I’ve been having a TON of fun writing over the last few months. I have a very good life.
I am constantly reminded of my deep gratitude for the gift of being alive. And I have the luxury of being able to worry about the limerent quality of being alive, unlike many humans in this world who are busy with just surviving.
Sure, it seems like I’m stressed about money all the time. The freelance lifestyle is great in some ways, but we pay for it in others.
I try my hardest not to give in to stress. To take deep breaths. Especially in the moments where I am hyperconscious of the gift of merely being alive.
Our history of breast cancer.
My grandmother Anne died of breast cancer that got into her lymphatic system. After a brutal 7 year battle, she passed on when my mother was only 13. The coroner said it was a miracle that she had stayed alive along as she had. He reported that her body was more tumor than healthy tissue in the autopsy report.
I never got to meet Anne. I only know her from my mother’s stories. But I’m told that I’m the spitting image of her. Old photographs confirm our resemblance.
I knew Anne had been a strong tomboy of a girl who used to compete with her brothers to see how far they could jump from the roof of the henhouse. My mother told me she was always laughing and smiling, even after she got sick. She was the youngest of nine siblings. The three youngest kids in her family all died from cancer when they were in their 40’s or early 50's.
Her long fight and traumatic ending deeply scarred my mother as a child. I can’t even imagine the experience of watching my mother grow more and more ill and swollen as a child. I can’t imagine losing one of my beloved parents as a young child. I know this happens to people all the time.
I really, really don’t want to have this happen to my kids.
In fact, I’m less afraid of dying than I am of abandoning my babies to grow up in the harshness of the world without me to protect and love them.
My mother has already had her cancer excised.
The lump and the precancerous cell mass were removed from my Mom’s breast by way of a partial mastectomy a number of years ago.
The doctor who performed the surgery had reported pessimistically at the time to her best friend that after the initial procedure it was likely she would have to come back in soon for a full mastectomy.
They didn’t think there was any way they had gotten all of it.
My mom is convinced it was through the power of prayer and the intercession of God that when she reported back in for her follow up scans, the margins of the tumor came back unexpectedly clear.
The radiologist even told her that they couldn’t believe they were reporting this, but the initial surgery seemed to have cleared everything and they weren’t seeing any remaining calcifications or lumps.
As an agnostic, I struggle with my mother’s belief system. But I am very glad to still have her in my life regardless.
Maybe she’s right. Maybe God did save her.
Maybe her belief is part of the reason why she is still here. Maybe that’s all you have to do is believe you’re going to be ok, for whatever reason.
But then why can’t I just believe that I’ll be fine too?
Instead, I wonder when it will be my turn. And I hate wondering this.
Then I wonder if I’m just borrowing trouble that I don’t need to. The mind is so capable of circling in endless loops of worry if we let it.
I had a lumpectomy when I was 25.
There had been a racing start gone wrong during crew practice.
Somehow during one of the drills at practice, I didn’t feather my blade fast enough. Instead of smacking the water with the back of the blade when the boat wobbled over to the starboard side, I had caught my edge in the chop instead.
Not able to keep up with the rhythm of my crewmates, the oar handle had come back and smacked me hard in the chest when it caught. The 64-foot long boat had turned, pinned in the water by my errant oar blade, and the coxswain had cried out “Stop!” with an edge of irritation in her voice over the botched attempt.
My chest had throbbed from the collision. We reset and tried the drill again. I just kept rowing, because that's what I do when there are others involved.
In the next few days, I discovered lumps all throughout my chest.
Somehow the impact of the strike had caused an infection to form in my lymph nodes. While sitting in the USC Norris Cancer Center to check out what was going on had been super scary at the time, at least I had known what the cause of the pain had been.
At the time, I was cleared and given antibiotics and sent home to recover.
Four years later, one of the lymph nodes had hardened and turned painful. The diagnosis had been a benign necrotic lipidosis. A dead fat cyst.
I went in for a lumpectomy to remove it when the cyst started growing rapidly. I still have a light purple scar on my right breast at the 9:00 mark where they took it out. That was back in 2001.
Maybe it’s just an old clogged milk duct?
I’ve considered breaking out the dry skin brush and working on my skin to see if I can break up the congestion in my armpit.
But part of me is scared that if there is something malevolent lurking in a cyst there, that I’d be foolish to try and increase blood flow and release whatever it is into my system at large.
My grandmother’s story weighs heavy on my heart.
Tonight, I am suddenly reminded of the pain I used to get when I was nursing my kids. The one where milk would clog up a milk duct and dry and get stuck. Or when I’d accidentally get engorged with milk from missing a feeding time.
When this would happen, I would massage the painful breast under hot water in the shower. Then I’d try nursing my baby flat on his or her back while I dangled my milky boob over their little mouth, willing gravity to be on my side and to drain the painful spot before it turned into mastitis.
Then I’d go to the fridge and crush up a green cabbage leaf, inserting the cold leaf into my bra for a 20-minute stint to let it work its plant-ish magic. You had to be careful not to leave the cabbage in your bra too long or it could actually dry up your milk supply.
I had successfully avoided mastitis during the 3.5 years I nursed my two kiddos using these powerful hedgewitch remedies.
But even now, 2 years after I have quit nursing my daughter, I can still squeeze enough milk from my nipples to serve the magical purpose of combatting pinkeye. Breasts are magical things.
Maybe that is what’s going on?
Just a clogged milk duct I think to myself hopefully.
Perhaps as an inadvertent result of careless little elbows, an old duct had simply gotten irritated.
My daughter was especially adept at digging her pointy little elbow into my ribs and breast tissue. She was an expert at throwing the accidental elbow strike right into the painful spot.
I try to resist googling lump in breast, knowing I will find nothing but terror in the pages of the fear-based internet.
But against my better judgment, I open the browser and type in, “do old milk ducts feel like lumps,” followed by “do old milk ducts hurt,” and then “clogged milk duct years after breastfeeding.”
“Some of the most common causes of armpit lumps are…”
I know I should not fully read or fully believe the pages that come up. They will only serve to further fuel my disaster mind about the whole thing. I know in the light of the morning, I will be taken away from my nagging worry by the mundane tasks of life. I just wanted help figuring out why I still had this pain.
I feel helpless and scared, and kind of stupid for being up in the night worrying about it. I’m healthy, I’m not going to die. Stop it, I think to myself.
I still haven’t made my son’s lunch for school tomorrow. My tired mind begins to wander. It is as if the lack of viable thought paths and answers have worn it out.
Well, tomorrow I’m going to buy a green cabbage and try that, I think sleepily to myself. I look at the clock. It’s 5:49 already. I still have an hour left to try and sleep.
Maybe that will make the pain go away.
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Kaia Tingley is a writer, artist, podcaster, digital strategy nerd, and sometimes hot-tempered supernova with a wild, free soul. You can find her on Instagram here or on LinkedIn here.