MY MAMMOGRAM MISSED MY CANCER

When the test failed, these women took charge of their health

R OSANNA Silber couldn’t shake the thought from her head: “I have cancer,” she said to herself, while traveling in Sweden in 2016.

“I just had this gut feeling,” says the now32-year-old mom-to-be from Chelsea.

A few weeks prior, she felt a pea-size lump in her breast, which her gynecologist believed was just a cyst. Silber insisted on getting a mammogram, typically considered the gold standard for catching breast cancer. The screening came back clear: no cancer. “I was relieved, but it still didn’t feel right,” she says. Additional testing eventually confirmed her suspicion.

Mammograms often detect breast cancer, and catching it early helps patients survive the illness and undergo less complicated treatment.

But they’re not perfect: Mammograms miss about 15 percent of all breast cancer cases, according to a 2015 report published in the journal Breast Cancer Research and Treatment.

Experts say that discrepancy is often the result of dense breast tissue, a common condition that affects about 40 percent of women over the age of 40. In mammography, the dense tissue shows up white — the same color as cancerous masses — making detection difficult.

“It’s like trying to see a polar bear in a snowstorm,” says Dr. Elisa Port, director of the Dubin Breast Center at Mount Sinai.

Women with dense breast tissue are at a slightly higher risk for getting breast cancer. Alone, it’s not enough to require yearly screenings before the age of 40, doctors say. But if additional risk factors are present — say, a direct family member has been diagnosed with breast cancer — it’s imperative to discuss early additional screening, such as an ultrasound or an MRI, with a medical professional.

In 2017, New York state enacted a law mandating that insurance cover such supplemental screening for women with dense breast tissue. Measures like these are encouraging to patients such as Alexea Gaffney, a Long Island doctor currently undergoing treatment for breast cancer that both an ultrasound and mammogram missed.

“It’s disheartening,” says Gaffney, 37, “that so many women are dealing with the same thing. We put our faith in these tests.”

On the following pages, four women whose mammograms missed their cancers share their stories.