I remember working for a couple in the nineties. It was one of the better employments in my working career. After seven years with them, the woman received a diagnosis of breast cancer. She took immediate action and had a radical mastectomy. Only, it was too late. The cancer had already spread.

The cancer developed into lymphoma. She set out to battle it aggressively, with all the treatments available. At a point they even did a super chemo, where afterwards they had to reintroduce her own fortified blood back into her system to keep her from dying of the treatment. None of it worked. She developed bone cancer, as well, and after nearly a two year fight she fell prey to the disease.

After her death, her husband fell completely apart, tore up from the floor up. I have never witnessed such a total meltdown of a man. Shortly, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was dead mere months later.

This left the business to their twenty-four year old son. He managed to keep the business running only another year before it failed. Five people lost their jobs. The community lost a tax paying business.

It is not clear whether this sequence of events would have fallen they way they did if the woman had received an earlier diagnosis. I just know she was only forty-nine at the time they began. I don’t know the wisdom in the recent recommendation that women under the age of fifty do not need regular mammogram screenings. Perhaps statistics prove there is not a high incident of positive diagnosis under the age of fifty, but what of it. Lives are still lost. Is that not still important?

I haven’t heard the greatest outcry against this. Maybe no one is taking it serious. I just fear this recommendation will eventually lead insurance companies to not pay for screening of women under fifty.