Low Risk on Every Score. She Pushed Anyway.
A veteran who refused to stand down
Laura Pearson is an Iraq War veteran, part of a sisterhood most people never think about: the women who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and came home carrying a cancer risk the rest of us do not share. Female veterans of these wars face meaningfully higher odds, tied to exposures they had no say in. Most of them do not know it. A lot of their doctors do not either.
Laura did everything right. Annual mammograms, always clear. When they flagged dense tissue, she got the added ultrasound. Clear again. By every number the system uses, she was low risk, and young for a diagnosis besides.
Then she felt a lump. By chance, she admits, because she had let herself skip the self-exams once the mammograms came back clean. Her OB-GYN felt it too and reassured her: probably cystic, nothing to worry about. Laura did not want reassurance. She wanted the test.
So she asked for a bilateral diagnostic mammogram, not the standard screening, because she had researched exactly what to request. When her doctor reassured her a second time at a later appointment, Laura held her ground. In her words: “She has many patients, but I have one life.”
They did the mammogram. Then a biopsy. It was cancer.
I have talked with a lot of women who got talked out of a test, or talked themselves out of one, because the odds said relax. And statistically, the doctor is usually right. A lump is usually nothing. That is exactly what makes Laura’s story matter. Self-advocacy is not distrust of your doctor. It is math. Your doctor plays the odds across thousands of patients. You only get the one body.
We’ve covered this before - catch up with Dr. Harriett Borofsky
What Laura did not know yet, sitting in that waiting room, was that she had an answer to the question almost everyone I talk to asks: why me? Hers traces back twenty years, to a base in Iraq, and to something she breathed every day without a choice. Getting the medical system to take that answer seriously turned out to be a second fight.
That fight, and what it says about how we treat the people who served, is in the full episode.
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Subscriber Article: She Served Her Country. It Raised Her Cancer Risk.
Topics Discussed in this episode
Self Advocacy & Communication
Low risk on every score, cancer anyway
Demanding the diagnostic test, not the screening
The private oncologist who wouldn’t listen
Telling her kids without handing them fear
Veteran Elevated Cancer Risk
The burn pit answer to “why me”
Cancer among Iraq and later-war veterans
Why the VA became her best care
Women veterans who stop mentioning they served
Another great piece Joelle. For reasons that you can understand, the line “she has many patients, but I have one life” made me think about the current controversy about CRC screening in people under 45 who might be susceptible.