A look into the symptoms of breast cancer
The problem with a cancer is that it can normally go unseen for a very long time. It’s not like a cold where you cough and the doctor can, while looking at your symptoms, understand what is wrong. Maybe you have pertussis; maybe you have influenza; the doctor can figure that out just by listening to your heart, your lungs, and coughing. However, with a cancer, it is a lot harder to tell whether you have a cancer or not because it does not appear. There is one tell tale sign, though, about whether you have a cancer or not. That is the term most people know as a tumor.
A tumor is an abnormal growth caused by an irregular mitotic time. That means that a cell should divide a certain amount of times in its ‘cycle.’ But, when it is cancerous, it divides a lot faster and a lot more. So, assuming a cell should only divide twice before it dies, a cancerous cell would divide ten or twenty times. And since the cell is abnormal as it is, they are able to reproduce far quicker than a normal breast cell. It is because of this, you commonly get what is called a tumor in your breast.
Two more terms that might be said often are malignant and benign. A benign tumor is a tumor that is not cancerous. That means that it is just a growth of some kind, but it has not yet become cancerous. Not all benign tumors become malignant, but no matter what kind of tumor it is, it should always be quickly removed. A malignant tumor, though, is a cancerous tumor. It has the ability to go to nearby tissues and invade and destroy them too. The term, metastasize means that the cancer is able to spread between tissues. So, what starts as breast cancer can spread to the lungs and to the liver and soon, the body is overwhelmed.
The only real symptom of a cancer, therefore, is a tumor. A lump in the breast is one of the first clues for doctors that there is something growing that should not be. However, the downfall is that there are certain types of breast cancers that don’t produce these lumps. So, they are virtually impossible to be caught and cause a significant amount of the deaths caused by breast cancer. Naturally, if the symptoms of breast cancer are caught quickly, it can be destroyed; however, women make the mistake of not getting their mammograms when they should and the symptoms are allowed to grow.
Because of the few symptoms of a cancer, it is imperative for a woman to get tested often. If there is a tumor growing, it can usually be felt by checking the breast. If anything feels out of place, go to a doctor and they will recommend a mammogram as well as a biopsy. This will help to determine whether or not it is a tumor or not. Then they can test it and if it is malignant, they can prepare the body for whatever treatments need to occur.