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How a mammogram missed cancer that's now incurable: Doctors reveal the types that are harder to spot... and how to stop this happening to YOU

Susan Leeson thought her clear mammogram meant she could briefly relax about her risk of breast cancer until her next routine screening in three years' time.

Source: Cubes | 

04.12.2024, 16:24

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Susan Leeson thought her clear mammogram meant she could briefly relax about her risk of breast cancer until her next routine screening in three years' time.

'I thought great, one less thing to worry about for a bit,' she says.

Susan, 56, who is married to a corporate lawyer and has a teenage daughter, now desperately wishes she hadn't put so much faith in the result. For seven months later, and only after going to A&E with agonising back pain, Susan discovered she had a fractured spine.

And the cause? Cancer that had spread from a strawberry-sized tumour growing in her right breast, to her ribs, hip and three different parts of her spine. In total, it was in eight different spots around her body and it was incurable.

'In the split second that I found that out, my whole world changed for good,' says Susan, a former career coach who lives in Balham, South-West London. 'I was in deep shock and I just kept saying over and over 'but I recently had a clear mammogram'. 

I was very emotional, but I had to try to pull myself together enough to go home and break the news to my daughter, who was only 15 at the time.'

Had her cancer been spotted on the mammogram, she says: 'The chances are that I would have had a little operation and be getting on with life.'

Instead, Susan has been told she has possibly only two years left – and she is now channelling the anger and frustration she feels at her situation into helping others. 'I want other women to know that there's a whole bunch of cancers that get missed by mammograms,' she says.

Susan Leeson, 56, thought her clear mammogram meant she could briefly relax about her risk of breast cancer until her next routine screening in three years' time

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