My Mammogram Waiting Game

I delayed getting one until I was supposed to. Would it have caught my cancer?

- Stephanie Mencimer

AT LEAST ONCE a year for seven years after I turned 40, a doctor would invariably tell me I needed a mammogram. Every year I said no, invoking the recommendations from the US Preventive Services Task Force, which say mammograms before age 50 aren’t usually necessary. Then in March 2017, when I was 47, I found a tumor. Sheepishly, I called my ob-gyn and asked for one of those referrals I’d been tossing in the trash. But now that I had something to justify a mammogram, getting one turned out to be a lot harder than I imagined.

My doctor’s office insisted I first come in for an exam. Once I got a referral, I called the Washington, DC, area’s largest radiology facility to book a diagnostic mammogram. The woman on the phone informed me that the earliest appointment was more than three weeks out. I told her I needed to come sooner: I could be dying! Check back in a week, she said; there might be a cancellation. The wait was excruciating. I was sure every second of delay meant cancer was creeping into my brain. Days later, a sympathetic scheduler found me an appointment at the end of the week. A biopsy later confirmed stage 2 lobular cancer.