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By Michelle Arellano Martin
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At 47, despite a wellness routine that included mushroom powder and collagen in my morning coffee, hiking, running, daily pilates with weights, strictly organic and healthy meals, and a largely nontoxic home and beauty routine, I still felt something might be off.
I was forgetting everything that wasn’t written down, shedding hair and gaining weight from simply looking at food. I assumed I was in the throes of perimenopause.
I wanted to get ahead of anything suspicious, so I went to the doctor, but my labs always came back normal. I was told that my symptoms were likely a combination of stress and yes, perimenopause.
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I thought I was healthier than ever, doing all the right things, but as a mother of two, there was still the underlying fear of: What if it’s something else?
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As a journalist, I started researching preventative, full-body MRIs and arranged a complimentary scan with one popular company so I could write about my experience.
I thought, at worst, the test might uncover an autoimmune disease or some deficits from all the drinking I did in my 20s.
Coincidentally, the night before my scan, I was showering and felt a small lump on the side of my breast. It caught me by surprise, but I thought it felt like a cyst.
I’d had one before and it felt the same: the size of marble, not too hard, and it seemed to move when I touched it. I was especially grateful for the MRI the next day and wasn’t too worried because I didn’t have a family history of breast cancer.
The scan took under an hour and was more comfortable than expected thanks to the Netflix shows I watched to take my mind off the fact that I was packed tightly into a metal tube. I did a blood draw, stocked up on coconut water and snacks in the lobby, and the technician told me that if there was anything alarming, they would call me within 24 hours.
Once 24 hours had passed with no news, I felt confident that everything was fine.
When the doctor called to share the results a week later, she said they found a small (1.5 cm) “indeterminate lesion” on one of my breasts. Part of it was smooth and part had irregular edges (which you don’t want). The doctor didn’t seem overly concerned but did emphasize that I needed to get it checked.
That was a Friday and by Tuesday night, I was told I had breast cancer.
My doctor had rushed a mammogram and ultrasound, and the radiologist was blunt. She said, “We can’t confirm it 100% until you have a biopsy, but I’m looking at your MRI, mammogram and ultrasound results, and I’m telling you that you have cancer.”
She gave me a BI-RADS score of 5 (a 95% or greater chance of breast cancer).
She was very matter-of-fact and pragmatic and I think that helped separate me from my diagnosis immediately.
She said it was small, it was early, and she didn’t see any spread in my lymph nodes. She advised me to schedule the biopsy and get my paperwork in order so I could start treatment and knock it out.
She spoke as if getting rid of cancer was a task on my to-do list—and that’s exactly how I’ve treated it from day one.
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What gave me tremendous peace of mind was the fact that I knew there were no suspicious findings anywhere else in my body, thanks to the full-body MRI.
I know there’s a lot of pushback on preventative, elective scans because they’re expensive and often lead to more unnecessary tests—and to be honest, I thought my article might lean in that direction—but I’m grateful for mine. Had I gone the traditional route of seeing a doctor about the lump, and then getting a mammogram, ultrasound and MRI of my breast, it might have taken much longer to know if the cancer had spread elsewhere in my body. And I’m hardly the first person to receive a cancer diagnosis after getting one of these full-body MRIs: Maria Menounos was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer after a mass was spotted on a Prenuvo scan, and Busy Philipps learned she had a brain tumor after doing the same scan.
Following my initial scans, I had a biopsy, which revealed hormone-receptor positive, HER2+ invasive ductal carcinoma. A whole new vocabulary and acronyms that translated to a highly aggressive, yet very treatable subtype of one of the most common types of breast cancer.
Additional ultrasounds, mammograms, biopsies and a breast MRI over the span of a couple months revealed a second tumor and the fact that this cancer was growing rapidly (my original tumor had already grown to 2.5 cm).
At this point my doctor declared the cancer stage 2 and I was immediately scheduled to begin a one-year treatment plan consisting of 12 chemotherapy sessions, surgery, radiation, a HER2-targeted therapy shot every three weeks, followed by a daily hormone-blocking pill for 5-10 years.
I was blindsided by my diagnosis. I thought I was healthier than ever, had no family history of breast cancer, and was always championing toxin-free living. So how did I get here—currently 10 sessions into chemotherapy?
The more research I did, the more I learned about the highly established link between alcohol and breast cancer.
Obviously we know alcohol isn’t good for us, but I had no idea that heavy drinking could increase breast cancer risk by up to 52%, especially if a lot of that drinking happened before having kids.
I’ve since learned that when we drink alcohol, it breaks down and damages our DNA, creating mutations that can become cancerous. Alcohol also produces more estrogen, which essentially locks onto those cancerous cells and acts like fuel, making them multiply, grow, and spread quickly—particularly powerful for hormone-positive breast cancer like mine, which is also on the rise.
Ironically, my best friend was going to fly out to help me through my final round of chemo, but she was just blindsided with her own (hormone-driven) breast cancer diagnosis.
It feels like a cruel coincidence, but it’s a direct reflection of the data showing a rise in hormone-positive breast cancer.
So while breast checks and mammograms are, of course, important for early detection, it’s also critical that we have more research identifying what, exactly, is driving this rise. Women deserve to know more about the links between things like alcohol and breast cancer so they can make informed choices to reduce their risk as well.
I’ll never know what caused my cancer, but I do know that I will survive this and I will continue to thrive.
I will also do anything in my power to reduce my risk of future recurrence, which includes leaving alcohol behind as I start my next chapter.
Michelle Arellano Martin is an award-winning journalist and the founder of Travara, a sustainable travel company. She splits her time between Spain’s Basque Country and California.
All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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