Do you know how to examine your breasts? Really? In this article we aim to show you what to look for, where to feel, how to feel, and what cancer might feel like.
Breast cancer usually can’t be prevented, but by checking your breasts, you could help to detect it earlier.
Adults of all ages are encouraged to perform breast self-exams at least once a month, doing this regularly can help you familiarise with how your breasts look and feel, so you can alert your GP if there are any changes. So, how do you check them, properly? Dr Liz O’Riordan, consultant breast surgeon, helps us explain…
Get topless in front of the mirror and look at yourself. If you have heavy breasts, lift them up so you can see underneath them. Turn to the side, and then the other side. When doing this, you are looking for lumps that you can see sticking through the surface of the skin. You are looking to see whether the nipple has been pulled in, and you are looking to see if there is a little puckering of the skin (see video for details).
The next thing you do is put your hands above your head, and then you put your hands on your hips and push in, tensing the chest muscles, doing both of these things can show you a lump or a tethering that you wouldn’t otherwise see.
The next step is to feel. The best way to examine your breasts is lying flat, at about 30 degrees e.g. lying down in bed with your head propped on a couple of pillows. This lifts a heavy breast onto the chest wall, if you have particularly large breasts that tend to flop to the side, you can roll your body towards the midline to lift your breast tissue up and onto the chest wall, making it much easier to feel if there is anything there.
When feeling your breasts, you should use the undersurface of your fingers. Keeping your fingers flat, you bend them at the knuckles, and what you’re trying to do is to squish your breast tissue against your ribcage underneath. A lot of women, especially around their time of the month can have very lumpy breasts, it can feel like a mixture of sweetcorn and jelly and it’s completely normal. Usually, this lumpiness would occur on each breast. If there is a lump there, you will be able to squish the breast tissue all the way to the ribcage each size, but you will feel the lump and you won’t be able to push down as flat - this is the kind of lump you should tell your GP about.
Think of your breasts like a teardrop, it doesn’t matter how you do it, but press quite firmly all over the breast until you get to the nipple, then press firmly on the nipple too. The final place to look is underneath your armpit, because you can get enlarged lymph nodes there. If you are slim, you may feel them normally, and they are about the size of a split pea or a lentil. Cancerous lymph nodes are bigger and firmer, like a marble or a boiled sweet. The trick is to relax your armpit, rest your hand on your opposite shoulder. With your other hand, try to squish the tissue and the fat of your armpit against your ribcage, get really high above the hairline and squish up there to see if you can feel any hard lumps beneath your fingers, and then do the other side.
If you have watched this video, examined your breasts and are concerned about a lump, contact us - it’s what we are here for!