I felt a lump in my breast while I was pumping to feed my 3-month-old daughter in January 2020, just before COVID. A few days later, my family and I were woken in the middle of the night to a 5-alarm fire raging in the apartment directly above ours in our Upper East Side apartment in Manhattan. We were displaced from our home, and I forgot about the lump. In March 2020, just as we moved down to my husband’s family’s house in Maryland, I noticed that the lump was still there and getting bigger. I made an appointment with a doctor, only to be quickly dismissed with “normal breast changes after pregnancy” when he realized I had recently traveled from NYC, the epicenter of COVID at the time. In August 2020 I made a stop at my OBGYN on a trip up to NYC, and she immediately referred me to a radiologist for an ultrasound. Just 3 weeks later, I was diagnosed with breast cancer, 9 months after originally feeling the lump and just shy of one year after giving birth to my daughter, Lily. Just a few weeks later, I had a double mastectomy, followed by 3.5 months of chemotherapy at MSK in NYC.
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