Opinion: Dense breast tissue can complicate mammograms. Women need to know if they have it
Advanced breast cancer after 11 straight "normal" mammograms? That might not have happened had I had known one thing.
Most women — and their doctors — tend to think of mammography as a one-scan-works-for-all test. I learned the hard way that it isn’t.
When I turned 36, I had a baseline mammogram. Then, beginning at age 40, I dutifully had a mammogram every year, convinced that it was the best way to detect breast cancer early should it ever appear. Six weeks after my 11th “normal” mammogram, my gynecologist felt a ridge in my right breast. An ultrasound revealed a quarter-sized tumor. When I received the startling news that I had , an advanced stage of breast cancer that had spread to 13 lymph nodes,
