Aw, cr@p, this ain't easy.
In 1974 P & G (headquartered here in Cincinnati) sponsered a program testing out the new mamogram system. Mom's family had a bit of cancer here and there. She was a fairly large breasted woman so manual detection was not completely effective. She decided to be part of the trial program. It found something so small the doctor could not even find it manually. She went in for surgery (at age 41). Wound up with a radical mastectomy of the left breast and quite a bit of the surrounding muscle and of course lymph nodes. Really could never raise her left arm above shoulder height after that. Follow up with radiation (which fried a cardiac artery and gave her a heart attack much later).
A neighbor woman, friend of Mom's, also went and was similarly diagnosed. Neighbors' daughter and I were friends. Neighbor had a partial (basically a big lumpectomy). Neighbor died a few years later. Mom past away of a stroke this summer, 33 years after her surgery. In 1974, the survival rate for breast cancer was pretty much in single digits. When Mom told all of us kids (7, youngest 9 at the time), I pretty much figured the odds were we were gonna lose her. The testing gave me 33 free years with her.
She died June 8th, 103 days after the big stroke, with her whole family around her. She was living with my sister the nurse for her last two weeks.