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Breast Cancer Awareness: Cancer can catch even the healthiest women by surprise

4 years 4 months 3 weeks ago Monday, October 21 2019 Oct 21, 2019 October 21, 2019 5:05 PM October 21, 2019 in News
Source: WBRZ

BATON ROUGE - A woman can feel like she's in the best shape of her life, but a deadly disease like breast cancer can still come out of nowhere.

Doctors have expanded and updated the ways they locate and remove cancer, and one beneficiary of those new methods is Trula Remson.

Back in April, Remson wowed the crowd, along with her husband Chris Remson, at the 2019 ‘Dancing for Big Buddy’ fundraiser. But just days later she was shocked to hear from her doctor.

“I was kind of on a high from that and, you know, feeling good... Had been really active," Trula said. “I never felt anything never had any problems. I just could not believe it."

She was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“It was really a scary moment for me and Chris,” she said. “I have no family history of it. I don't think I even had any risk categories. I don't smoke. All the things you normally hear, I had none of them."

Not marking in any of the risk factor categories, Trula was scared of how the disease would change her life. But fortunately for the architect, the cancer was found at a very early stage.

“The doctors told me six months from when you found it, it could've been a different story. So I'm just so glad that I did my regular, yearly mammogram and got it taken care of early,” she said.

Doctor Michel Hailey at Woman's hospital helped Trula get through the frightening diagnosis. He says the use of new, high-powered digital technology like 3D mammograms is helping doctors locate and remove breast cancer that would not have even been detectable just a few years ago.

“What that technology has allowed us to do is to decrease our call back rate for more mammograms by 10-15 percent, but we're also finding 10-15 percent more cancers early,” he explained.

Doctor Hailey says it’s predicted that more than 270,000 women will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer this year. But he says 62% of those diagnosed will be at an early stage.

“If we diagnose it in those early stages, the survival in five years is 95-99 percent given effective treatment,” Dr. Hailey explained.

For Trula, who has a busy life running her business and dancing the night away, she's grateful for life and the improving technology that keeps helping women fight breast cancer.

“It's a bad thing, but it's treated just very methodically. And they take care of it,” she said.

According to Susan G. Komen Foundation, nearly one in every eight women will develop invasive breast cancer in their lifetime, but technological advances have helped reduce the number of people who die by 25 percent over the past three decades.

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