One in every eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer at some point in our lifetime. Whether you survive or not depends in large part on your own watchfulness. When breast cancer is caught in the early stages, it is almost always curable. Left alone, a tiny speck of cancer will grow and eventually infect the entire body.
Friends for Life is a program designed to help you and a friend protect yourselves. Here are three simple things you can do to maintain your own breast health:
- Choose your Friend for Life. It can be your mother, daughter, sister or a friend. On the 13th of each month, call your Friend for Life and remind her to do a breast self-exam.
- Share your personal and family history with your doctor and ask how often you should have professional check ups.
- Regular mammograms are so important because 70% of women who develop breast cancer have none of the risk factors.
Caring for your health is not difficult or expensive. Self-exams take only a few minutes a month and a mammogram takes less than an hour. We urge you to watch WZZM 13 and follow our Friends for Life campaign. We hope our news stories on breast cancer will keep you informed as well as answer your questions with quarterly phone banks.