My name is Marcy Olin and I am the VP of Sales of the Speechless Division. This is a topic that is very near and dear to me because my grandmother, mother, and sister all had breast cancer.
It’s really important to talk about self-breast exams; not just mammograms and MRI’s. My mother had a mammogram and it came back with nothing wrong but within a month she found something she felt needed to be checked out. Had she not been doing self-exams it wouldn’t have been caught so early. All the lymph nodes were involved and infected and she had to undergo very severe chemotherapy and radiation.
I urge everybody, especially if they have a family history to do genetic testing to find out what their likelihood is. My mother, sister, and grandmother all tested negative for the BRCA gene. There’s a very big misconception that if you are negative you will not get breast cancer, that’s got nothing to do with it. It’s a really important issue to do your homework on.
Every year I go and get an MRI and a mammogram because of my family history. I urge people to go get tested, and check yourselves, because the earlier the better. It’s important to have baseline films to make sure nothing is changing through the years. It’s a never-ending battle but it is always better to know and to get tested.
