I was a 38 year old mother of 2, married, ate right, exercised, no cancer history, breast fed my kids, when on a Sunday morning in the shower doing my routine self breast exam I felt a lump.  

5  years and a double mastectomy, dose dense chemotherapy, radiation and one-thousand-eight-hundred and twenty five Tamoxifen pills later, I am alive and kicking.  I am a writer, a blogger, a non-profit founder, a hands-on mother, wife, daughter and more than anything I am the most grateful woman on the planet that something as simple as a self-breast exam on a leisurely weekend morning quite literally saved my life.  

 So it is with anger and outrage that I read the headlines today that a new study says women should wait until 50 to have mammograms.  And worse yet, that self breast exams are useless.  Here's the link to the article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33973665/ns/health-womens_health/

Excuse me?

 Listen, I know the deal.  I know it's about money.  I know we are in a health care crisis.  I get the fact that we have these amazing machines to detect disease and nobody can afford to pay for them anymore.

 But is killing people the answer?  I don't think so.  

 And if you worry that I'm being dramatic, Hell yeah I'm being dramatic.  I am in a theatrical froth right now.  Because out there somewhere is a woman who is reading that trash about the new mammogram advice with cancer creeping around her breast and she isn't going to know it.  She's going to blissfully go through her day and her week and do her job and meet her friends and she is going to think "hey I'm good, I'm not 50 yet.  Cancer can't get me."

 And she is going to be dead before she ever sees that birthday.

 And why do I know that?  Because if I'd ever had the misfortune to follow these outrageously deceptive new health guidelines regarding mammograms, self-breast exams and their relevance in early detection--

 that woman would be me.

 Here's the best part of that article, and yes I am being sarcastic,

 "The task force advice is based on its conclusion that screening 1,300 women in their 50s to save one life is worth it, but that screening 1,900 women in their 40s to save a life is not, Brawley wrote."

 Hey Brawley--and I'm assuming Brawley has never had cancer--I have two people I'd like you to meet.  They are my children.   They are 10 and 7.  And thanks to that "useless" self breast exam and the not-necessary-mammogram suggested in the article you're quoted in,  they still have a mother.  And they think that is very much worth it.

I happen to agree. 

And because I don't like to bash anyone without at least offering a solution to the problem, here's a start:   you get kids when they're 16-like I was in highschool, when the gym teacher told us to start self breast exams--and you tell them to do them.  You show them how,  so as they grow they will know how their breasts are supposed to feel. 

 You take that money you invested in this bogus study and put it into something that actually saves lives--early detection AT AN EARLY AGE.  You get to kids when they're young and have a fighting chance.

 Then you don't have so many freaked out women at 40 who begin so late that they don't know what their boobs are supposed to feel like, and they create all those false positives and all that wasted medical money that the panel is so worried about.

In the meantime, you leave us 40 year olds alone, and you encourage us to keep on top of our health, and our breasts and our lives, instead of dissing our own health and leaving it til we're 50.   Let me give you some information:  if I'd followed such an ill-fated medical message under the guise of staying healthy,  I'd be dead by now.

 How's that for a study?