When Susan Michaelis, 60, a pilot turned safety consultant, found something on her left breast she went for a mammogram but the results left her with a nagging doubt when it grew
The all-clear on a mammogram should bring reassurance, but when Susan Michaelis was told there were no abnormalities on the X-ray images, she still felt uneasy.
A few weeks before the invitation for a routine NHS mammogram Susan, a pilot-turned-aviation-safety-consultant, had noticed something on her left breast. It was a tiny spot and a small area of thickening under the skin. Susan, 60, said: “It wasn’t a lump, it was more like a blemish, about a millimetre across.” Her doctor checked it and said there was nothing to worry about, but added that she should come straight back if anything changed.
The mammogram only left Susan, from Horsham in West Sussex, with a nagging doubt â and over the next couple of months the blemish slowly grew until it was two millimetres across and had become a little red. So she went back to the surgery and a biopsy was arranged for the following day. Three days later she got a call to say the doctor wanted to see her. “I went in and was told, âyou have invasive lobular breast cancer’,” Susan recalls. “I replied, âlobular what?'”
Lobular cancer starts in tiny glands, called lobules, which produce breast milk â and when it becomes invasive and spreads it tends to grow in single-file strands of cells rather than forming a lump. Susan says: “Because of my flying background I went into problem-solving mode. I was in shock, but I thought, âOK, what do we do about this, what is the process?’ I didn’t have the time to collapse in a heap, although I have had my moments since.”