I am terrified of these lumps on my chest.

Growing up, while others wished theirs would get bigger and boys searched up models with voluptuous, fake ones, I stood in front of the mirror and examined mine.

Average for my age, I suppose, but it didn’t have to do with fascination or appreciation. I was scared. I wanted to avoid the unavoidable growth of my breasts.

There needs to be more education for young women about breast cancer so they can better prepare, prevent, and face the possibility of it without fear.

Every year, my mom goes for her mammogram. And almost every year, she receives a call about something unusual.

And every year, I hold my breath.

Luckily, when she goes in, she finds out there’s nothing to worry about. Just fibroids and dense breasts.

Dense breasts, usually inherited from a parent, can make cancer harder to detect during a mammogram. Almost half of all women have dense breasts, which increases their risk for breast cancer.

I can’t tell if I have dense breasts, and neither can a doctor during a routine breast exam. It can only be determined by a radiologist after a mammogram.

But every time my mom receives one of those calls, I think about my music teacher, who was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer — the most aggressive form — when I was 13. After being cancer-free for five years, it returned, and what started as breast cancer spread. Everywhere.

She has passed away since then. I often think about her two daughters. How growing up will never be the same. How because of this treacherous disease, they will never feel their mother’s touch again.

Or my best friend’s mom, who was diagnosed during our freshman year of college. And her mom’s mom.

Or two of my very own grandmothers, who survived but were deeply affected.

This doesn’t even scratch the surface. Every year of my life, I’m faced with a new person who has been diagnosed with this awful cancer, which affects one in eight women.

What scares me most about this rational — but slightly irrational — fear is that I know absolutely nothing about it, despite the people in my life who have been diagnosed.

As we approach the month of October — Breast Cancer Awareness Month — the sum of my exposure to the disease boils down to the “I love boobies” bracelets boys wore in middle school — not for the meaning, but for the joke. And the tens of women I know and have known who’ve been diagnosed.

As a woman, I’ve never been educated about the effects of breast cancer, when to get a mammogram and where, and most importantly, how to prepare or prevent this disease from invading my body.

Going into this column, all I knew was that I was scared to know. Scared to research. Scared to fall down the black hole of internet searches. Scared for that irrational fear to become rational. To be told, unlike my mom, that it isn’t just fibroids.

Despite these fears, I did my research, mostly in an attempt to ease my mind and show myself that I have time before I need to really worry about it.

I was wrong.

40-years-old. This is the recommended age to get a mammogram, yet the most common ages for breast cancer diagnosis are 15 to 39.

Around 70,000 men and women under 40 are diagnosed with cancer each year in the United States. The most common cancer for women in this age group is breast cancer.

According to Yale Medicine, an estimated 26,393 women under 45 are expected to be diagnosed with breast cancer in 2020. More than 1,000 women under 40 die from breast cancer each year.

In 2019, there were 405 breast cancer diagnoses among women under age 50 in Iowa. To continue the facts, from 2017 to 2021, the breast cancer rate in Iowa was 29.7 percent, compared to 29.3 percent in the U.S.

Crazy, right?

Abby Wedemeyer, a fellow peer of mine at the University of Iowa, has an experience unlike mine. Her mom is a breast cancer survivor. She mentioned that breast cancer awareness often misses or overlooks the fact that when someone’s family member is diagnosed, there’s a higher possibility they’ll be diagnosed as well.

Wedemeyer advises and advocates for women to get mammograms as early as they can, as her mom’s first-ever mammogram led to a stage 3 diagnosis.

“Growing up, I always had to mark the ‘cancer’ checkbox when filling out the family health history form at the doctor’s office,” Wedemeyer said, “Therefore, I was often told to make sure I was getting regular breast examinations and to schedule mammograms in early adulthood. Being told I should start getting mammograms in my mid-twenties felt a bit daunting.”

In 2023, The National Library of Medicine published a study showing that when young women go to their doctor uncertain about their health related to breast cancer, doctors are apathetic because of their age.

“I went to a doctor once, I was about twenty-two, and said, ‘Oh, I’ve got weird lumps in my breasts.’ And she went, ‘No, that’s just water retention,’ and was really dismissive,” One of the survey respondents said. “I just think that it would be better for doctors not to turn around and tell you you’re far too young when you have genuine concern.”

Why, as a young woman nearing 22, was I never aware of the threat breast cancer poses before 40? Why was I never taught about breast cancer? Do others feel the same?

Studies show that when it comes to risk factors and screening tests for breast cancer, 92 percent of women are unaware of them.

Education and awareness could save lives and reduce medical costs. I’m not saying fundraising should stop — I know it has a major impact. But what good is fundraising if we don’t educate the people who might go on to battle this cruel disease?

When we start educating, we change the narrative. Teaching high school and college students about breast cancer awareness could help them prepare for the future. And at least then, they know.