Breasts, Bumps and Brilliant Scanners
At long last, we might be winning the battle of the boobs.
Now, before you start furiously composing hate mail with a pink glitter gel pen and a strong whiff of lavender, let me be clear… I mean this in the most clinical, non-sleazy, NHS-endorsed way imaginable. Because last week, something genuinely marvellous happened. News broke that improved breast screening could detect an extra 3,500 cancers a year in the UK. That’s not just a win, that’s a full-blown, champagne-popping, brass-band-blaring celebration with a conga line of jubilant radiologists doing the Macarena through the MRI unit.
Let’s pause for a second and think about that. Three. Thousand. Five. Hundred. That’s the population of a small British town. Or more to the point, that’s 3,500 women who get to live longer, keep their hair a bit longer; and hopefully never need to experience the joys of intravenous chemo while watching Loose Women in a hospital chair that smells faintly of disinfectant.
This has all come from new scanning wizardry that’s helping spot tumours hiding in what scientists politely refer to as “dense breasts.” Now, if you’re not familiar, dense breasts aren’t what the average man sees walking down the beach in Benidorm. They’re not beach balls. They’re more like… overstuffed duvets… plenty going on under the surface, and a real pain to see through using traditional X-rays. The trouble is on a mammogram, tumours show up as white blobs. Dense tissue also shows up as white blobs. So what you get is a sort of Where’s Wally? scenario, except Wally might kill you if you don’t find him in time.
Enter the scanning dream team… contrast-enhanced mammography (CEM) and abbreviated MRI. One injects a bit of dye to make blood vessels stand out, the other works faster than your usual MRI, which let’s be honest, can feel like being buried alive inside a Dyson vacuum for 45 minutes. These techniques are apparently three times better at detecting tumours in women with dense breasts. Three times. That’s like swapping out your blindfolded darts champion for a Navy sniper.
Now, some people are wringing their hands because these advancements mean cancer diagnoses are going up. And to that I say: GOOD. That’s exactly what we want. Catch the enemy when it’s still in nappies, not when it’s built a fortress and applied for planning permission. The more cancers we find early, the more lives we save… and the more likely we are to turn “You’ve got cancer” into something that feels more like “You need a filling” than “Start writing your will.”
Look, I’m not saying cancer treatment will ever be pleasant. No one’s queueing up for a course of radiotherapy the way they do for an iPhone launch. But if we can catch it early enough, we can swap months of brutal chemotherapy for a day surgery and a mild telling-off from a nurse about your diet. That’s not just progress, that’s a revolution.
The trouble is the NHS, in its infinite, biscuit-fuelled wisdom, doesn’t currently offer extra scans to women with dense breasts unless they happen to stumble into a research trial or shout very loudly at a consultant. The logic presumably, is that scanning costs money. But you know what else costs money? Cancer that’s missed, spreads and turns into a multi-million-pound medical saga with more side effects than a Brexit trade deal.
So here’s a thought; let’s start treating early diagnosis as the bargain that it is. Let’s stop treating breast cancer like a guaranteed death sentence and more like catching a slow puncture before you’re stranded on the M6 in the rain.
And maybe, just maybe, it’s time we changed the way we talk about cancer altogether. Less doom, more deal with it. Fewer hushed whispers, more frank chats and fewer death metaphors. Because one day, if we keep going like this, cancer could become just another annoying detour in life; like catching a cold, or owning a Fiat.
And when that day comes, I’ll be the first to raise a glass. To the researchers. To the radiographers. And frankly, to the remarkable variety of breasts, perky ones, pancake ones, torpedo-shaped, wobbly, wide-set, and whatever the hell else Mother Nature’s decided to put out there. You’ve got one job; keep an eye on them.
Because the earlier we spot the lump, the better the odds we’ll still be here next year, arguing about who left the fridge open.
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Chris Geiger, Author of The Cancer Survivors Club.
Daily Dose of Disbelief!
Bsky: @chrisgeiger.com
Bsky: @thecancersurvivorsclub.com
Bsky: @dailydoseofdisbelief.com
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