It can be a mistake to ask someone how they discovered they had breast cancer. One woman I know found it during an illicit tryst; another as she was stripping off to go skinny dipping. Lauren Mahon, though, has no qualms revealing how she found her lump. “I was masturbating,” she says. “I grabbed my breast and went, ‘Oh my God – what’s that?’”
As a healthy 31-year-old with no family history of the disease, she had never had cancer on her radar. “I didn’t check my breasts – I didn’t think I needed to worry.” When she went to A&E to get it checked out – the only way she could see a doctor as she had recently moved out of her parents’ home and hadn’t yet registered with a GP – she was told she was almost certainly fine and she put it out of her mind. It was only when her mum asked her if she’d got a referral to see a specialist that she finally did see the GP, and got an appointment at the breast clinic.
