Words Spoken in the House...
- Deborah DeKoff
- Feb 6, 2018
- 2 min read
Today, I was honored to speak in the House chamber at the state Capitol.
The bill passed out of committee - moving forward with the hopes that all women will learn of their tissue type, and what it means to have dense breast tissue.
This was my speech.
If knowledge can save a life, do we not have a right to know? A right to know the density of our own breasts? And what the ramifications of dense tissue mean?
We are your daughters and grand daughters- most of us have dense breasts because we are young - a mammogram will fail half of us... like a “Sophie’s Choice” - who gets the information about additional screenings that may save her life? If daughter A lives in one of 31 states with notification legislation, she will. If daughter B lives in a Utah, she will not.
We are your wives - who are told that because we are the random age of 55- we no longer need that annual mammogram. But because we nursed your children, because we stayed active and watched our weight, or just because - we still have dense breasts - and mammograms will fail half of us. And two years until the next mammogram will be too late, and may bring a de novo stage of 3 or 4...
We are your aging mothers, who have lost friends and family to a disease that kills indiscriminately. We hold their stories in our hearts and pray we won’t have to bury a daughter, a granddaughter, a niece - just because - they weren’t informed, they didn’t know, how could they know? That dense breast tissue hides cancer on a mammogram. That those of us with dense breasts are more likely to have breast cancer - even if no other family member has ever had breast cancer - than someone who has two close family members with breast cancer.
If knowledge is power, let women of Utah become powerful with the knowledge that can save their lives. I implore you : Pass dense breast tissue notification.
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