Ahead of her 50th birthday, American internist Dr Lisa Larkin, an expert in menopause management, had been doing all the right things to live a long and healthy life, including having regular mammograms.
Her most recent routine scan had turned up nothing untoward. Given the all-clear, she went off on a camping trip with her children to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa’s highest peak.
It was on this trip in late 2013 that she felt a large mass in her breast.
Breasts are made up of two types of tissue: glandular tissue and fatty tissue. If your tissue is more glandular than fatty, you have dense breasts.
On a mammogram, dense tissue appears white when compared to fatty tissue. Abnormal growths also tend to be dense and white, so imaging of dense tissue does not always show a potentially cancerous lump.