Let's be clear about this. A false positive is, IMHO, a good thing. A "false positive" means that the mammogram identifies "something weird." Your doctor checks it out and it turns out to be nothing. You heave a sigh of relief and go home and hug you kids or kiss your significant other or thank your Goddess. Have a glass of champagne. Have lunch with that old friend with whom you've lost touch. Buy those shoes. Get a massage. Mozel tov.
There is nothing wrong with a false positive.
Well, unless you're an insurance company and you just paid for, say, a biopsy that turned out benign. Apparently, insurance companies would prefer to only pay for biopsies that turn out malignant.
You know what? Fuck the insurance companies.
I had a false positive once. A few year after i had breast cancer, something showed up on a mammogram. The doctor said to me, "I bet you this is nothing. What will you bet me?" I sat up and, naked from the waist up, grabbed his white lab coat. i looked directly into his lime-green eyes and I said, "Are you kidding? I've had breast cancer. I'm betting with everything that I've got -- everything -- each time that I walk though your doors." He sobered up, stuck a needle in the weird spot, was able to aspirate (pull liquid out of) it, and gladly declaimed it a false positive. I was happy. He was happy. Maybe my insurance company was pissed off; I don't know. I don't care.
A year or two later, I had another false positive. One of my blood tests indicated pretty clearly that the breast cancer had spread to my liver. That means just a few months to live before you die pretty ugly. That weekend, I realized that the one thing that I needed to do before I died was to go back to the creek where I used to go hang out when I was a kid. So, i did. And, on Monday, I went for a liver scan. Liver looked great; false positive. I was happy. Maybe my insurance company was pissed off; I don't know. I don't care.
Here's what i want. I want them to find every single little weirdness that they can find. If I have to undergo a needle aspiration to my sensitive breast tissue, fine. If I have to undergo a biopsy, fine. If I have to come back for more films, fine. CAT scan? Fine. And I hope to hell that all of them are false positives.
Women, please. Starting at 40, get an annual mammogram. Please.
4 comments:
I had a false positive a few years ago that scared the shit out of me -- went through the mammogram, the sonogram, the MRI and then the biopsy (because of its location, it wasn't just a needle biopsy). My insurance paid for all of it, which was a good thing.
I was glad it was a false positive, all right, but ever since that time I've been scared every time I went in for a mammogram (especially since a few times they've had me coming in twice a year for something that might be suspicious).
Still go, though, still do the BSE, and hope.
False positives cost the insurance companies the costs of covering the tests. Scans, bloodwork, and needle biopsies.
True positives cost the insurance companies hundreds of thousands of dollars more.
One would think that these companies would prefer false positives to true ones.
I had a pain just below my knee. Anti-inflammatory medicine didn't work, ruling out tendonitis, which I am tore up with.
So the doctor told me this could be as serous as bone cancer because it was a weird spot for their to be pain without tendonitis or muscle injury. X-rays showed nothing out of the ordinary so he scheduled blood tests and a bone scan.
A bone scan is an expensive procedure but fairly simply. In my case, I was injected with radioactive potassium and thirty minutes later or something they scanned to see where the potassium was going. All of it was attracted to the spot where I was feeling the pain; so, thankfully, there was no cancer. But I had to twist in impossible ways for the radiologist to do more extensive x-rays of my leg until he finally found the stress fracture in my tibia that had been blocked in previous x-rays by the fibula.
The insurance upon learning of the stress fracture decided that a $1000 bane scan had been unnecessary and refused to pay for it. So my doctor told them what he would have charged had me treated me the way he intended prior to the bone scan results. They decided the bone scan had been a good after all.
I had an irregularity on a pap smear about a year ago, necessitating another pap smear a mere four months later. Fortunately, my "low-grade squamous anomaly" "resolved," as they say, or else it had been a false positive all along.
The province paid, and there isn't a day go by that I'm not damn glad for it, too.
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