I found a lump in my breast, and I'm terrified.
On Sunday, after a long time without checking, I touched my breasts and noticed a lump. It's kind of round and movable. I know these aren't necessarily bad characteristics, but I have anxiety and I'm already freaking out. I managed to get an appointment today (Tuesday) with an OB-GYN.
She talked a lot about my history: I'm 34, I have PCOS, and I was on birth control for 5 years but stopped 2 months ago because I was having a lot of headaches. We also talked about hormonal fluctuations over these past 2 months and my irregular cycle after stopping the pill.
When she felt my left breast, she joked: 'The good thing about being skinny is that it's easy to feel things.' When she touched my right breast at the bottom where I found the lump, she asked, 'Here?' and I said yes. She examined it with a more serious face. That made me even more anxious.
She asked me, 'Are you okay with just my opinion, or do you want to get imaging done?' I found that question weird, and even wondered if I had understood it right. I'm Brazilian and still not used to the American way of doing things and interpreting certain situations. So I answered: 'I'd like to do the imaging either way, but I would also like your opinion.'
She replied that she didn't think it was a big deal, that it's probably a fibroadenoma, and that at my age it was unlikely to be 'something bad.' I asked her one more time: should I be worried, and what did she really think it was? She answered more explicitly: 'No, no, no, you should only worry if I worry.'
She ordered an ultrasound only for the right breast where the lump is, which I found weird because in Brazil they do an ultrasound of both breasts for these types of exams (I've had dense breasts before and I've had one done). Because of that, I asked her to order it for both breasts. She told me that when I go to get it done, I would need to say I was in a lot of pain, because otherwise they wouldn't do both, as it's standard American procedure to just do the one side.
Then she explained that if they found anything abnormal on the ultrasound, they might order a mammogram and maybe a biopsy. This explanation made me more anxious. I don't know if she was just explaining the procedure, especially since she had just explicitly said it was nothing and very unlikely to be something bad.
American women, should I be worried, or is this normal here? Anyway, I already managed to schedule the ultrasound for next Thursday.