Breast Cancer Awareness Month and here I am in the midst of fighting my own battle with breast cancer. This past May, I had a normal breast exam during my annual checkup. By early June, after a family vacation and a lingering upper respiratory infection, out of nowhere I developed a painful lump in my breast that I mistakenly assumed must have been a cyst or an abscess because somebody once long ago told me that, “breast cancer doesn’t hurt.” and, “breast cancer doesn’t grow fast.” Having tested negative for the BRACA gene after my sister’s ovarian cancer diagnosis in 2019, I was under the very false impression that I somehow dodged a bullet and received a “get out of cancer free card” so the idea that this painful lump in my breast might be cancer quite frankly didn’t even cross my mind. So, I postponed my annual mammogram appointment for several weeks with hopes that this inflamed little almond-sized lump in my breast would be gone for fear that the crushing clamp of the mammogram might somehow burst the little bugger and cause an even greater problem, perhaps spreading this “infection”. Well, I was wrong in so many ways. Both the lump and the pain did not subside, but in fact they worsened to a point that I began developing a low-grade fever and wound up in the emergency room. Long story short, I find myself now in the midst of treatment and I am not alone. Did you know that every two minutes a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States? Check out the link to the National Breast Cancer Foundation for facts and statistics on breast cancer. And for my part, if I can share one important thing with you it would be, it is not always true that breast cancer doesn’t hurt. It can.