I’m embarrassed to say it, but I’ve never been super great at remembering to do breast self-exams. It’s always a sort of afterthought to shaving my armpits. Like, “Oh! While I’m in this region, maybe I’ll just do some other poking around.”
It was during one of these not-frequent-enough feel-ups that I noticed a bit of pain when I poked and prodded. After further investigation, to my horror, I felt a lump. I panicked as I finished my bath, visions of chemotherapy and cancer treatments blurring my vision.
As I toweled off, I took a look in the mirror at my neglected boob, which now was at the center of my every thought. Not expecting to see much of anything, I was surprised at the quarter-sized circle on the side of my right breast.
After several Google searches and a nipple-covered selfie that I sent to my bestie, I began to chill out a bit. It seemed that most dangerous/cancerous lumps in the breast are not red and rarely cause pain. Chalking it up to some vicious spider bite, I took my wise friend’s advice and drew a circle around the red lump with a ballpoint pen to note the initial size and tried to forget about it as I fell asleep.
The next morning, as I got ready, I noticed that my right lady was sort of throbbing and took another look-see in the mirror as I applied my deodorant. My lovely blue pen-drawn, quarter-sized circle was no longer an accurate measurement of my “bite”.
The painful red lump had, at least, doubled in size
I decided to call the doctor on my lunch break. While I was obviously a bit worried, I guessed that I would talk to a patronizing nurse, who would tell me that it was probably an insect bite and encourage me to keep an eye on it. But I was surprised, instead, to be transferred from the nurse to the doctor and told to come in ASAP.
What was going on?
A few hours ago, I was happily relaxing in the bath, and now here I am, sitting masked and unsettled in my doctor’s waiting room.
My doctor asked me a few questions and gave me a real breast exam that was super painful, thanks to the lump and the redness that was now expanding over my entire boob. It took her about two seconds to tell me what was up.
“You have mastitis," she said
“Um…what?”
“Mastitis.” She said again, matter of factly.
“As in a clogged milk duct — MASTITIS?”
“Yes.”
I told her that must be a mistake. I explained to her that I wasn’t nursing. I had not nursed in more than three years.
She patiently told me that, while uncommon, it is completely possible to get mastitis when not nursing. It can be caused by bacteria entering the breast through dry or cracked nipples. It can also be caused by stress.
Ding. Ding. Ding.
Stress
That was a definite possibility.
She prescribed me with a hard hit of antibiotics and told me to be aware that I probably would get COVID-19-like symptoms in the following days, but they were, most likely, the infection associated with mastitis in my body.
As if speaking it into life, I spiked a high fever on my way home and spent the next 24 hours feeling achy and fighting off chills and nausea.
It was a rough go, but I made it through to tell about it.
To tell the story years from now about how, once upon a time, in the year 2020, kids no longer went to school, people wore masks to the grocery store, there was a nationwide toilet paper shortage…
And these dried-up, non-nursing boobs got mastitis.