A breast cancer survivor creates an app to teach self-examination by touch – Marie Claire Magazine

Jessica Baldad, 36 years old, cured of a breast cancer In 2019. Since curing the disease, she created a Facebook page to share her journey, telling her how she discovered the tumor and the steps she took, with the goal of encouraging young women like her to prevent and get themselves checked.

After some time, I decided to turn the page into an application and feel your life (“Feel for your life”, free translation) was launched in September of this year, just in time for the Breast Cancer Prevention Campaign, pink october.

“I’ve found that there are three reasons why women don’t do self-examination. They are afraid to find something and don’t know what to do, they’re uncomfortable with their bodies and they don’t know how to do it because they don’t,” Jessica said in an interview. good morning america.

She has a family history of breast cancer. Her grandmother, grandmother, and five aunts and uncles all had the disease, and Jessica discovered a polyp at the age of 18. She had surgery to remove the tumor and since then has made it a habit to have regular tactile tests.

“I had a pain in my chest and ran to the bathroom quickly, before class, and noticed I had a tumor, which freaked me out,” she says, adding that she ran to the emergency room after class and took exams, only to find the tumor. “It was this experience that got me into the habit of doing a self-examination of myself for the rest of my life as an adult.”

Fifteen years later, in 2018, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. In March, she stopped doing the self-examination because she had a scheduled appointment for a routine exam, which made her feel calmer. “Is he there [enfermeira] He didn’t say anything about the block, so I thought it was fine” GMA.

Two weeks later, she found a lump while doing a touch test on herself, but thought she had taken the professional exam and hadn’t been told anything, it wasn’t a big deal.

“I started freaking out, I thought: This is it, it’s cancer. But then I thought: Calm down. I go to the gym almost every day, take care of myself, eat well. I just saw my doctor, for sure she would have said something about it,” he recalled.

She calmed down and moved on with her life, but returned to anxiety when an acquaintance who was one year older than her published a post about shaving her head due to breast cancer. She decided, in August 2018, to examine the lump that she could feel in her breast and found out that she had breast cancer.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control, the vast majority of breast cancer cases occur in women age 50 and older, but this does not prevent younger women from developing the disease. However, the doctor who performed Jessica’s examination claimed to have seen the tumor but thought it wouldn’t be a major problem due to her age, and failed to warn her about it.

For this reason, I decided to launch Feel For Your Life as an app, with the goal of helping other young women who aren’t familiar with self-examination to estimate breast cancer prevention and learn how to do it in their routine.

“I thought about the app from a woman’s perspective, and I wanted it to be really intuitive for how women can use it. I’m not a developer or programmer, I’m an advocate. I see the app as an advocacy tool that women can use. To connect with your body. I’m not a doctor and I’m not trying to be — My job is to help women advocate for their health,” Jessica said.