The Cut - When a Mammogram Misses Breast Cancer

In the middle of the night, Angie McCoy flipped onto her stomach in bed and felt something hard in her right breast. It was July 2020, and she and her husband, Tim, were staying at a rental house in Texas Hill Country while they waited for the construction of their new home to be finished. She didn’t know how to describe the sensation — it wasn’t quite a lump, but something about it felt off. It was most pronounced when she lay against a firm surface.

The next day, McCoy made an appointment with a general practitioner, who referred her for a mammogram and an ultrasound. The radiologist told her that both of those scans were negative — he couldn’t see anything that indicated cancer. “I think we’re just dealing with dense breast tissue,” he said, adding that she should come back in six months for retesting just to be sure. Dense breast tissue. This was nothing new: Radiologists had always mentioned that McCoy had dense breasts, but she didn’t understand what it meant or why she should care. None of her doctors had ever said this might be cause for concern.

Angel City is set to become the world’s most valuable professional women’s sports team with a $250 million sale. A stegosaurus skeleton sold at a Sotheby’s today for $44.6 million — the most ever paid for a fossil. Also today, Lily Gladstone and Kali Reis became the first Indigenous women to receive Emmy acting nominations. And a nice thing: This man named Bushe turns his neighbors’ hedges into beautiful art.

Sign up to get Brooding, a subscriber-only newsletter interrogating modern family life, written by Kathryn Jezer-Morton.