Hi Ladies,

A few months ago I found lumps in my breasts, went to the doc, had a diagnostic mammogram and ultrasound and was told there was "nothing suspicious" at that time. After a few months of hell wondering whether or not I would need surgery or would die (well, we all will die, but, you know), I breathed a huge sigh of relief and had a fabulous glass +3 more of wine. Still, why the lumps?

Part of it is my own body design and partly because of my one-cup-of-coffee-in-the-morning habit. Totally floored me when the doc and sonogram techs told me about the connection between caffeine and breast lumps, because I grew up a no-mo and have been drinking coffee without incident since my teens (with a 13-year hiatus due to living the WoW while a TBM). By the way, I'm 49. I stopped drinking coffee for two weeks, went in for a follow-up exam and one lump had disappeared while the other two shrunk almost half their size. My body is just more sensitive to caffeine than the regular jane (damn, damn, damn).

While I'm not advocating anyone quitting their coffee habit, I mean, I just posted a few weeks ago on RfM about my favorite coffee maker, I just wanted to let you know what's going on with me in case this happens to you. To replace the coffee, I now more frequently drink wine (juuuuust kidding).

I hope you all are doing well. Thanks for listening.

toto

I had breast cancer when I was 53. This was after living the wow for 20 years. The doctors seemed a little frustrated they couldn't find anything to blame it on. I didn't smoke, drink, do caffeine, or have a family history. I also wasn't overweight. The only factor that fit, was my age.
You are in the age range when most women get breast cancer. They can't really say what may have caused you to get it. It could be hormonally influenced.
It's horrible how they let you go for weeks not knowing if you're going to die, or if it's no big deal. I went through the same thing. It seems to be a part of the whole process.

Since having cancer I have had several "suspicious" calcifications that dissolved with a needle biopsy.
IMO it's just the luck of the draw until they come to a better understanding of this disease. I have known several women who had breast cancer in their early 50's, and then never had a problem with it again. However, it can be a chronic disease for some. I have been clean for 5 years.

Keep up your mammograms. Early detection can save you a ton of misery, not to mention your life.
I noticed a small change in skin texture about the size of a dime I wouldn't classify it as a lump. I had it checked out right away. DONT delay if you have anything that is different than normal. If you put it off, it may kill you.

Yes, I agree, I'm not out of the woods just because of one okey-dokey from the tech dudes. I will continue, as I've done for over ten years, to get my yearly mammograms.

Thank you.

Coffee makes me somewhat manic and then I go into a depression. I also LOVE coffee. I love the taste of it and I love the energy boost. I drink tea now except for the occasional cup o' joe just because. :)

I do love, or loved my morning coffee. Hope the lack of such will help my lumps decrease and that nothing more develops. Enjoy your tea!

But I still miss my coffee. :)

And I understand the scare as well. I've been on mammograms every two years because my girls never accepted the fact that we aren't feeding babies anymore. (In fact, my youngest baby is 28 years old!) And when my daughter in law had my youngest grandchild darned if I didn't start trying to produce for him. Since fluid from the girls is a sign of possible cancer I've been getting them mashed for a few years now. Everything is fine -- except for the fact that I'm still prepared to feed a horde of orphaned babies. lol

What age should a woman start getting mammograms?

Definitely ask your doctor, but I was told by 40. You should be doing the self breast exams already, every month and your doctor should perform a breast exam at every physical and when you have your annual pap smear.

My boobs make microcalcifications. I am 42 and have already had a surgery to remove one and biopsy (turned out benign). I had my first mammogram at 38 -- I went in early for a baseline because I do have a family history. They found the microcalcification at 40. I had a needle biopsy and then the wide excision biopsy. Now I get mammograms every six months.

If I was not high-risk, I would get the first one at 40 unless you have a family history, and then think about 35. The breast tissue is more dense in your 30s and the mammos don't reveal all that much, so sometimes doctors order ultrasounds instead of/in addition to. Then I'd go every year or every other year after that.

While I appreciate that thermography is much safer, good luck finding a facility that offers it and finding a doctor to order it. It's not up to patients, usually, to choose the method of screening. Also on the radiation: the x-ray people tell you that it's a very small dose of radiation. Carol Y. says it's a very large dose. How can you tell what true is?

Note: All of the procedures I mentioned above were done with mammography guidance. So, at 42, I have had something like 30 mammograms because they took so many films before and during the biopsies. I've been looking into this radiation thing. I am not convinced that the many mammograms won't actually cause cancer and that this isn't just a big scam on the part of the medical establishment. Shoot us full of rads and then charge our insurance companies exhorbitant rates to cure us. And the alternative is, you can skip all the screenings and try to get yourself cured of cancer later. Or you can gamble that you just won't get cancer and you might win that bet. Or you might not. I have attempted to get other ways to screen such as ultrasound, but the docs aren't having it. You have to weight out the risk of overexposure to radiation against the risk of not catching cancer early enough to treat effectively. That decision is very different for everyone.

The major cause? Aging.

Second major cause is dense tissue which also hampers a proper diagnosis.

My advice to all women is this: Ask for the clinical report. Find out if you have dense tissue. Do not accept the little form letter happy grams they send out as valid.

I've had a yearly mammogram every year on the dot for the last 27 years and received those bogus letters 27 times. In actual fact the doctors did not know if I had lumps because the normal tissue looks just like tumor tissue on film.

My cancer has been growing undiagnosed for about four years. The only reason they took notice this time is because I demanded a "diagnosic" mammogram with an ultra sound option. I did that because I've been blind off an on for a year and couldn't drive myself and needed to be sure the whole process could happen in one visit. Also, I was uncomfortable with the slap dash way the scanning was being done and I didn't like having to sign a paper saying they weren't responsible for missing tumors since I was only getting a "short visit screening."

Since then I'm learned more the hard way than I ever wanted to know about different kinds of scans, needle and surgical biopsies, lumpectomies, followup care, adjunct therapies, guidewire and clip insertions and much much more.

Oh Cheryl, I'm so sorry. As if you hadn't been through enough medical procedures the past year.

;o)

BIG difference with diagnostic mammogram. I didn't know that until after the fact, because that was the only type I'd ever had.
Since I've had cancer I get diagnostics only.

You can't depend on the news media and your GP, or even your gyno to tell you everything. You must educate yourself.

Nor can we count on honesty and openness from doctors and medical technical workers.

It's hard feeling betrayed by a whole branch of women's health care when your life depends on submitting to those who have discounted you.

...eye opening, enlightening, frightening, sad, but most of all, caring.

ajhart - you have a while until you need a mammogram. A baseline is usually done around 40 so subsequent mammograms can be compared to it.

dogzilla - thanks for sharing your story; I'm glad you're being taken care of.

Cheryl - I want to hug you, and I agree: I've never felt so alone while in the presence of another woman professional as I lay on the examining table as she submitted me to an ultrasound. Without a word, without any comfort, without any indication of anything, she gave me the worst exam of my life. I began to cry during the ultrasound because the silence was killing me. It's made me rethink my life's endeavors because I would've treated me so much better. Professionalism sucks. What about a hey-I'm-almost-done statement? Or don't-worry-this-isn't-cold encouragement? Again, I want to hug you.

Actually, I want to hug all of you. Thank you for opening up about your experiences on this board. I cannot thank you enough.

I've read that you shouldn't take in caffeine before you go for a mammogram, so there's probably something to the caffeine connection.

Where did you read that? No deoderant or talcum powder or caffein?

Men can get breast cancer too.

I got so fed up with people trying to find a cause for my breast cancer. Plastic water bottles, living too close to a rocket test site, etc.

We live in a fallen world. Bad things happen. You'll drive yourself crazy looking for a reason.

I also had several miscarriages. Bad things happen in a fallen world.

Blaming yourself for drinking coffee won't help anything or anybody.

I'm sorry about your miscarriages. I can't imagine the difficulty of dealing with your losses. Miscarriages and any other bad things that happen shouldn't be blamed on the individual at all. I hope you're not blaming yourself for something out of your control. My heart goes out to you.

In terms of coffee, though, there is a correlation, in my case, to caffeine intake and breast lumps. After I questioned the reason for my lumps since reports from a diagnostic mammogram and an ultrasound revealed "nothing suspicious" about them, three professionals, including my internist, suggested as an initial intervention that I stop drinking coffee to see if the lumps would reduce. Thank god, in only 2 1/2 weeks, one lump entirely disappeared and the other two shrunk half their size. My body is more sensitive to the effects of caffeine than others may be. It sucks, because I loved my morning coffee.

If the caffeine reduction wouldn't have had an effect on my lumps, other options to reduce them would have been suggested, like surgery.

This doesn't mean I'm out of the woods in terms of developing breast cancer. I have yearly mammograms to ensure early detection, if so.

And no, I don't blame myself at all. We were able to find this initial factor contributing to the lumps so I altered my morning routine as a result (I'm also 49, and as Cheryl stated, aging is also a cause of breast cancer).

Thank you for sharing.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 03/28/2012 10:03AM by toto.

they were used as milk-jugs for many years. I get calcifications from caffeine. But I refuse to quit-- it is my religion. I have no history of breast cancer in my family, except slow-growing in extreme old age. So I just don't bother.

It's obvious on mammogram film but not to the individual woman.

Only Connecticut and Texas let women know that their breasts are dense and that this makes mammograms incapable of finding MOST irregularities. Over half of them are missed in these women who are 4 to 6 times more likely to develop cancer.

Why don't medical technicians and doctors tell women this information about themselves? Because as it was explained to me several times, "Insurance doesn't cover more revealing kinds of scans."

One-half of pre-menopausal woman and one-fourth of post menopausal women have dense tissue and have no way of knowing this. Mammograms will show less than half of the lumps in these women.

You must ASK about density and REQUEST digital mammograms, ultra sound, or MRIs. Otherwise, you might have lumps the doctors can't see and they won't likely tell you your film looks like a bowel of wet concrete in which nothing much could be seen unless it's huge or very near the surface.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/28/2012 02:24PM by Cheryl.

http://uterinefibroidstreatment.org/breast-fibroids/

@toto-

Have you ever heard of caffeine possibly causing solid masses in the uterus? I'm curious because a couple of years ago, the gyno found a solid mass in my uterus. After a trans-vaginal ultrasound, it had disappeared. My sisters have also had issues with ovarian cysts, but those are fluid filled, right, ladies?

@presbyterian-

Nothing wrong with speculating what might be harming your body. It can be somethings as simple (and I'm not talking cancer, just health in general) a laundry detergent, a type of milk, citrus fruits, etc that adversely affect one's health. For example, I never knew I was severly allergic to dust. Now I know why i have so many issues with my sinuses etc. and can take steps to at least lighten the symptoms.

I'm just speaking from my perspective and experience and don't claim general knowledge about anyone's issues. I'd suggest a check up with yer doc.

I drink massive amounts of coffee and tea, so I didn;t know either way. No health insurance, so no doc to ask.

Web MD is a good source though. :)

The thing I've learned from typing medical records (for hospitals) is that doctors are not gods and they are guessing as often as they know if not more often. The women I work with--most feel the same way. You can go 2 ways doing this kind of work--some have become hypochondriacs and go to the doctor for every little ache or pain or sniffle--and the rest of us don't trust doctors. They don't have all the answers and many of them are burned out. It is rather a thankless job.

It is one thing to educate yourself. It is another to get doctors to give credance to anything you have to say or any questions you ask.

The most important thing you can do is take care of yourself and get more than one opinion.

Medicine is a business--it is about the bottom dollar no matter how we look at it. I don't have much faith in the medical community.

I have no way to prove it, but I suspect my breast cancer may have been caused by chronically low vitamin D levels + age. There are studies that show this happens. I didn't know about the vitamin D connection until after the fact. Now I take it every day.

I've lived in the north all my life. If I don't supplement with vitamin D I test low. I don't like dairy products, which are fortified with vitamin D. I haven't had a glass of milk since I was about 10.