Reading scans, waiting for my own: A breast cancer story

Editor’s note: This blog contains images of surgical recovery.

I was already carrying the kind of exhaustion that becomes so normalized in medicine you almost stop questioning it. I had just visited a friend in New York, and even in the middle of beautiful dinners and long-awaited plans, something felt wrong. I could barely stay awake. Every night, I retreated to my hotel room and slept.

At the time, I told myself it was burnout.

Residency teaches you to explain away your body’s warnings. Exhaustion becomes discipline. Stress becomes normal. Pushing through becomes identity.

But deep down, I knew something wasn’t right.

Not long after, I underwent a breast MRI. Though I hadn’t yet trained formally in breast imaging, I understood enough to know what I was seeing. I remember opening the images and staring at the screen. Even without advanced training, I could see it immediately.

The left breast glowed — bright, irregular, wrong.

I remembered snippets from lectures — plateau kinetics, washout curves, suspicious enhancement patterns.

I remember thinking quietly to myself: This doesn’t look good.

The next day, they called me back for biopsies. Three MRI-guided biopsies on the left breast. Two ultrasound-guided biopsies on the right.

Then came the waiting. It became its own kind of illness.

At the time, I was rotating through interventional radiology. Every day felt physically impossible. I remember standing through long procedures wearing heavy lead aprons on a body that already felt depleted. My legs hurt. My back hurt. My mind was somewhere else entirely.

I remember shuffling through the hospital hallways in oversized, hospital-issued blue scrubs that never fit quite right. I hated those scrubs. They somehow made me feel even smaller during a moment when my entire world already felt like it was collapsing inward.

Every few minutes, I checked MyChart. Epic. Anything.

A cold reality

One afternoon, right before scrubbing into a procedure, I logged into the computer in the cold pre-procedure room to check whether my pathology results were available.

And there it was: high-grade ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) with microinvasion.

I stared at the screen in disbelief. My heart sank. It felt as though the air had been pulled from the room. One moment, I was a resident physician preparing for a case. The next, I was a person diagnosed with breast cancer.

I don’t remember thinking clearly after that.

I rushed out of the room in tears and into the radiology administration office. My program director’s door happened to be open. I had just passed him in the hallway minutes earlier, trying to keep my composure and stay unnoticed. Instead, I found myself standing in his doorway, sobbing uncontrollably, trying to form the words:

“I just found out I have cancer.”

He looked stunned.

“Just now?”

I nodded.

There is something surreal about becoming the patient while still wearing the physician’s scrubs. One minute, you are caring for others. The next, your own life fractures in front of you.

When the doctor becomes the patient

What made it even stranger was that shortly after learning I had breast cancer, I began a rotation in breast imaging while still waiting for the rest of my story to unfold — additional biopsy results, treatment recommendations, and decisions that would shape the months ahead.

During the day, I interpreted mammograms and breast MRIs for other women while quietly wondering what my own future would look like.

I would read reports discussing suspicious enhancement patterns, recommendations for biopsy, and conversations about dense breast tissue and supplemental screening. Then I would leave the reading room and sit alone with my own fear.

As both a physician and a person going through a diagnosis, I became painfully aware of the disparities that still exist in breast cancer screening and access. I found myself asking difficult questions: Why had it taken so long to find this? Why are some women offered advanced screening while others are not? How many women are walking around right now feeling dismissed, uncertain, or unheard?

Those questions eventually became part of my advocacy.

But before advocacy came devastation.

 ‘… I was already carrying a heaviness that had been building for years.’

Cancer did not arrive in isolation.

In the years leading up to my diagnosis, I had already endured profound personal losses — the death of my grandfather, the unexpected discovery that the man I believed was my biological father was not, and family ruptures that left me with more questions than answers. It was the kind of truth that reshaped my understanding of who I was and where I came from.

There was grief in realizing that part of my story wasn’t what I had always believed. But there was also deep disappointment. Some of my deepest wounds come from the people closest to me, and I learned that loss comes in many forms. Sometimes it’s the death of someone you love. Sometimes it is the loss of certainty about who you are. By the time I heard the words breast cancer, I was already carrying a heaviness that had been building for years. For years, I had wrestled with questions about meaning and purpose. I would lie awake at night wondering: If my life ended sooner than expected, would it have mattered? Who would have truly loved me? Who would I have helped? Would I have lived fully enough?

A diagnosis of cancer has a way of stripping away illusion. It forces you to confront what remains when achievement, perfection, and expectations fall away.

What I learned was this: Life is far less controllable than we want it to be. People disappoint us. Bodies fail us. Plans collapse. The future we imagined for ourselves can disappear overnight.

For a long time, I was angry — angry at my body, the healthcare system, and the uncertainties that surrounded my diagnosis. Angry that despite all my medical training and vigilance, cancer still found me.

But eventually, I realized that carrying anger was exhausting me more than cancer itself. I realized I couldn’t move forward while holding on to so much of it. I had to begin letting it go. Not because everything was okay, but because carrying anger was keeping me stuck.

I began to learn that forgiveness isn’t about pretending everything is suddenly okay. It’s about moving forward without being consumed by resentment.

Healing, I discovered, is not always loud or inspirational.

Sometimes healing looks like getting out of bed when everything in you wants to stay still. Sometimes it looks like showing up to work, reading scans, and moving through the day while your world still feels splintered underneath. Sometimes it is simply surviving the day.

When my experience became my purpose

Months after my diagnosis, I decided to return to studying mammography. I attended the American College of Radiology Breast Imaging Boot Camp and returned to the workstation determined to see breast imaging through a different lens — not only as a radiologist, but as a patient.

The pain from my surgical scars still reminded me of cancer with nearly every movement. As I sat at my workstation reviewing mammograms, I found myself staring at cancers hidden in dense breast tissue, difficult to see even for trained eyes. I thought about my own diagnosis and the mammogram that had appeared reassuring just months before my cancer was found.

For the first time, I understood how easily reassurance and uncertainty can coexist in breast imaging.

Rather than discouraging me, it deepened my resolve. For the first time, I understood that my experience as a patient and my training as a physician were no longer separate parts of my life. They had become one.

In that moment, I realized that helping women navigate breast cancer, advocating for earlier detection, and improving access to better screening was no longer simply a career path — it had become a calling.

Looking back, I think that was healing.

Not because the fear disappeared, but because I had found purpose within it. My work was helping me reclaim a sense of identity and purpose that had felt so fragile after my diagnosis. .

People often tell people diagnosed with breast cancer how “strong” they are. But strength can feel very different from the inside. Sometimes strength is simply continuing forward while terrified.

Even now, I still think about the version of me walking those hospital hallways in oversized blue scrubs, exhausted and frightened, trying desperately to hold herself together.

I wish I could sit beside her for a moment.

I would tell her to keep going.

I would tell her that the questions keeping her awake at night — whether her life mattered, whether she had loved enough, whether she had made a difference — would not be answered by a diagnosis.

I would tell her that meaning is found in the people we help, the stories we share, and the ways we show up for one another in our hardest moments.

And I would tell her that one day, the very thing she feared most would become one of the most meaningful parts of her story.

That, more than anything, is the legacy I hope to leave behind.