Dear SP87 I feel I daren’t ask what a hemagioma is. I am afraid medical terminology, tests of different organs etc fill me with anxiety hence I only go to see docs if I have a symptom. There’s a whole world out there of people getting good money for worrying all of us. I found out I had a recurrence of breast cancer only by chance recently but I sincerely believe it will make no difference to my long term outcome. Everyone has abnormalities in tests which will get picked up if you keep testing. Mammograms pick up a lot of malignancies which won’t kill people. If you look on the NHS website it says three yearly mammograms for women aged from 51 to 70 lead to over treatment for 4.300 people a year in the UK, 1,000 malignancies that are potentially lethal, and that means a lot of people are having treatment for no good reason. Unfortunately they can’t predict who will go on to die from the 5,300 who genuinely is benefitting. My first cancer was at age 47. My recurrence was found by me without mammograms as I didn’t go for them. I am now 66. It’s been in my body 19 years as it’s the same cancer I had in 2003. It hasn’t spread to my lymph nodes. I get the same treatment now as I would have done if It had been detected earlier. The treatment is mastectomy as apparently you can’t have another lumpectomy once you have had one. 19 years test free and mammogram free hurrah, even if I do now have two tumours. And I have avoided surgery for 19 years too. Tests lead to other tests, they are going to pick up a lot more things wrong with me now as I am now not the incredibly healthy person I was then (I’m joking I had cancer). I read that the low grade breast cancer I had takes roughly 10 years to reach 1 cm - the size of my original tumour. So that makes sense now I have two tumours roughly 2 cm each. So there should be plenty of time to find any more I get. It’s a weird disease. I think genetic testing may be the future. I am involved in the Generations study where women are followed through for years. I think this is the way to go. Like Long Lost Family we will find out astonishing things soon.
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