When I was little, we used to collect the lids off of yogurts with pink ribbons on them and mail them…somewhere. That may have been the first time I became aware of breast cancer. This year is my first Breast Cancer Awareness Month having actually had breast cancer. I...
Hi there! I’m Caitlin, the Marketing and Communications Manager here at My Gene Counsel. One year ago this month, I was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 33. The irony is not lost on me that my job at a healthcare tech startup focused on accurate and timely...
A 46-year-old woman who claimed to have pathogenic variants in both BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes and a strong family history of breast cancer came to a surgeon seeking risk-reducing mastectomies. Although this woman did not have breast cancer, based on her account of her...
A 36-year-old, non-English-speaking, female emigrant from the Middle East came to see a genetic counselor at a California healthcare system in 2019. She had recently moved to the state, and in the process of reestablishing care at a large academic healthcare facility,...
In the summer of 2019, a genetic counselor at an academic healthcare facility saw a 39-year-old African American woman who had been recently diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma. A mammogram and subsequent biopsy of the lump she had felt on her left breast turned...