Too Young for Breast Cancer – Andrea Hans’ Story

Andrea Hans is a health advocate and breast cancer survivor. This is her story in her own words: 

In November of 2020, I felt a strange lump in my chest. A lump of delusion, I thought, but brought it up in the form of a mammogram request to my doctor. “You are too young for that in your late twenties”, my doctor asserted. I agreed. I was too young to think about annual scans, too young to be ill, too young to think about death. Too young to lose my breasts. But it did happen to me, and unfortunately my story is not unique. According to the National Cancer Institute, approximately 12,000 American women under the age of 40 are diagnosed with breast cancer each year.

While I didn’t want to believe there was anything wrong, I needed proof. I insisted on a mammogram and when the report came back, all they could tell me was that I had dense breast tissue, which can make breast cancers harder to detect and thus leads to an alarming amount of cancers being missed when using mammography alone. In March of 2023, the FDA finally acknowledged this pressing issue by setting a national guideline requiring mammography facilities to inform patients with dense breast tissue about their increased risk factors. In my time, however, I was still told that because I was young and had no family history of breast cancer, it was “probably nothing”. 

One month later, the tumor had almost doubled in size. After two mammograms and a lumpectomy, the “nothing” I had been reassured of was actually a stage 2B phyllode malignancy. They advised a mastectomy and radiation. It was surely a mistake – a breast cancer diagnosis at 29 is something that happens to some unlucky others, never to you. How will I feel about my body afterwards? Will it affect my fertility, could it damage my ovaries? How do I feel about breastfeeding never being an option? Can I ever trust any doctor again?

In medicine, risk is often measured by statistics. Numbers do not lie. We simply cannot screen everybody for everything, medical resources can not be spent on scanning for rare diseases at random and looking for needles in a haystack. All this sounded reasonable up until a few minutes ago, now nothing short of a stab to the heart. When you are that statistical anomaly, by the time you become that number it is often too late. I was hit with a tidal wave of questions, worry, and fear. As an American, there was the added stress of dealing with insurance coverage issues as well. 

My mastectomy could wait a couple of months because I had already had a lumpectomy in March of 2021. This time window allowed me to research different options, seek second opinions, and manage the insurance coverage side. I wish I had had access to a device like Koning’s Breast CT (KBCT), I wish being young and having dense breast tissue had not led to such a detrimental, potentially fatal, missed diagnosis. With KBCT, women can now skip the pain and still ensure quick and truly accurate exams. This is nothing short of revolutionary.

In August of 2021, I finally had a double mastectomy with immediate reconstruction. I speak candidly about my story not to scare young women, but to encourage them to use their voice. Do not be afraid to insist, to inquire, to insist again. You know your body better than anyone else. Even as the breast imaging industry gets modernized by Koning, you will remain your best advocate. 

Andrea Hans 

@andreahansoc