I’ve spent the last few days dumbstruck by Peggy Orenstein’s careless, angry New York Times Magazine piece, “Our Feel Good War on Breast Cancer.” A mammogram isn’t something you stare into space twirling your hair thinking about twice. If you don’t have a family history, get a baseline at 35 and annually once you hit 40. If you do have a family history, you probably have to start earlier.
What bothers me the most about Orenstein’s article is that most people aren’t privileged enough to live in NYC and have access to the best care and the most progressive thinking. If you live outside NYC, Los Angeles or any other cosmopolitan area, chances are strong a woman won’t be encouraged to get a mammogram until her 50th birthday. Under those guidelines, I wouldn’t have made it to that first appointment. I guess Ms. Orenstein would say I might of, and I should have, taken a gamble. After all, I had the good kind of cancer: Stage 1 DCIS (Ductal Carcinoma In Situ); or in layman’s terms, the one that grows slowly.
I was diagnosed the morning of March 31, 2011. I walked into the exam room, fully cooperated with the technician, positioned my body just so and then I left, not thinking twice. Breast cancer was never a part of the language of my life. It didn’t lurk in the corners of my childhood or adolescence. And when stories cropped up in my adult years, they belonged to someone else; friends of friends or the mother, aunt or sister of so-and-so. I had the good fortune that nobody I was related to ever had it. So, I ran back to work, feeling good that I had done something good for myself. I whisked into my meeting, and two hours later, sitting at my desk, I got the phone call. The cliché one when you know your life with all its flaws will never be the same, or even look the way it did yesterday.
Read the rest at the Huffington Post.
Follow Tara L. Meltzer on Twitter at @tmeltzmsnbc.