Breast Bumps

When I was a girl my mother would say to be very careful with your breasts. Don’t let them get bumped and later I wondered if that also included letting a boy squeeze them too hard. Even later I’d laugh at the idea that bumping or man-handling could hurt a breast or cause the dreaded—cancer. So unscientific, so old-fashioned.

Yesterday in the New York Times, and excerpted in many papers, the new-old research that an outside agent—bruise, wound or injury—may be the necessary catalyst for a dormant cancer cell to begin its changes. Cancer needs two factors: to exist in a dormant state and to have a trigger. An injury can be that trigger. Also explains –in a very crude way—why it happens that someone feels perfectly fine, undergoes surgery and then rapidly dies of cancer. Surgery may be a trigger wound.

Now isn’t that a scary dish to set before Cancer Land?