Genetic Testing

I met with the oncologist on Friday, and she did a mini-family-history complete with family tree.

We have knowns and unknowns. The knowns are easy - we don't know of any relatives who had breast cancer. Most of the women on both sides of my family have lived into their 80s and there was no breast, uterine or ovarian cancer among them. That's good.

But there are unknowns. One grandmother had a sister who died at a young-ish age (younger than 60) of cancer, but no one knows what type. The oncologist said that people didn't talk about female cancers then (decades ago) - and that if no one knew what type it was possible it was a female cancer.

On the other side, my grandmother lost sisters and her mother in the Holocaust. We will never know if any of those women might have developed breast cancer.

For those reasons, and because the risk of the BRCA genes is higher in Askenazic Jewish women, she recommended genetic testing, so I'll be having that too.