Lucia Henao knew that cancer ran in her family, so she took the necessary steps and scheduled her yearly mammograms.
She underwent her screening and it came back clean, with no signs or spots that needed further review. But as KGTV
reports, two weeks after the mammogram, her breast began to leak blood. That is when Henao contacted Dr. Julie Barone, who recommended she undergo a ductoscopy, which is a procedure that looks at the ducts of the breasts and can find growths at microscopic levels.
"The most common cause of bloody nipple discharge is papilloma. They are benign breast growths but they are very, very small and sometimes they don't show up on an ultrasound or a mammogram," Dr. Barone told the news source.
Henao underwent the ductoscopy and they did indeed find cancer. Luckily, the disease was caught early, and after six weeks of radiation treatment, she was cancer-free.
"If they hadn't discovered that at that stage, probably now I would be like stage three or four," Henao told the news provider. "That saved my life."
More than 200,000 new cases of breast cancer are expected to be diagnosed this year in the U.S., according to the American Cancer Society.