Do you have symptoms of breast cancer?

In my recent posts I’ve been discussing breast cancer and have been talking about what it is and offering up some talking points to speak to your doctor about.

Today, I’m going to talk about the symptoms of breast cancer and the importance of getting into see your doctor to either rule it out or catch it early.

The most common symptom is a painless one-sided lump. The lump is usually discovered by self-examination, during a physical or via a mammogram. Routine mammograms are important even if you don’t have any symptoms. Sometimes a diagnosis of breast cancer will follow suspicious findings from a routine mammogram screening in a patient with no outward symptoms.

In more advanced breast cancer cases, you many find changes to the contour of your affected breast and a lump that may eventually become immovable.

If you have distal metastasis this means that your breast cancer has spread to another part of your body. In this case your symptoms would be determined by the location to which the cancer has spread.

If your breast cancer spreads to your bones, you may find you have chronic bone pain. Likewise if your breast cancer spreads to your brain you would experience neurological symptoms like the kind of headaches that would not respond to over-the-counter headache medications.

Furthermore, if your breast cancer spreads to another part or parts of your body you may experience severe weight loss, fatigue-inducing anemia, and eventually death.

So do yourself and your loved ones a favor and conduct self breast examinations, visit your doctor for a regular physicals and ask to have mammograms scheduled on a routine basis. The key is to surviving breast cancer is to catch it early.