Of all the places a lump can appear in someone with a history of breast cancer, the hollow above the collarbone is among the least welcome. Supraclavicular nodes sit at the end of the drainage route from the chest, and a firm swelling there in a cancer patient is treated as spreading disease until something proves otherwise.
For a 68-year-old woman one year past a mastectomy, the something turned out to be her own skeleton. A CT scan showed that her first and second ribs were fused into a single bony mass, and had been all along.
