Topic: Doctors Forgot to Warn People With Breasts That the Covid Vaccine Could Affect Their Next Mammogram
“So let me tell you about this medical scare I’ve been having for the last few days,” was the opening line from my mother during our bi-weekly FaceTime call. Like countless women, she’d gone in for her annual mammogram and was expecting to receive a prompt notice from her doctor’s office telling her all was well and to remember to schedule another mammogram around the same time next year.
Instead, she got a letter with the words “found” and “most likely benign” too close together in the same sentence. As my mother would eventually find out after spending days mentally planning her own funeral, the swelling of her lymph nodes was a false flag triggered by having received the second dose of the covid vaccine a few days before her mammogram.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, as more women receive the vaccine, doctors are noticing a sharp rise in their mammograms showing swollen lymph nodes under the arm—which, under different circumstances, can sometimes be indicative of breast cancer. For most recipients of the covid vaccine, doctors say that swollen lymph nodes are a common response by the body. “The whole point of the vaccine is to get your immune system to mount a response to whatever the vaccine agent is,” one doctor explained to the Cleveland Clinic.
Lymph nodes which function as filters for trapping viruses in the body often serve as one of the early detection signs for breast cancer. When the lymph nodes swell it’s part of a larger immune system response—and when those nodes are closer to the breasts, they can be indicative of a cancer spread. Because the vaccine is shot into the upper arm, doctors are not surprised that the common immune response of swollen lymph nodes is showing up in the underarm area.
Topic Discussed: Doctors Forgot to Warn People With Breasts That the Covid Vaccine Could Affect Their Next Mammogram
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