staff spotlight
STAFF MEMBER
MARY LAI
According to the American
Cancer Society, about 12% of, or
one in eight, American women
will develop breast cancer during
their lifetime. As of 2016, there
are more than 2.8 million
breast cancer survivors
here in the U.S. HAC Group
Fitness Instructor, Mary Lai, is
one of them.
by Rachel Mayan
Mary, now five
years cancer
free, teaches
Group Fitness
at HAC.
I was triple positive for all
three bio markers, and because I
was HER2 positive, they determined
it was a more aggressive form of
breast cancer.
16
HACHEALTHCLUB.COM
Leading up to her diagnosis, her health was
fine. “I’ve always led a healthy lifestyle. I was
never overweight, and at that time, I was parttime teaching four fitness classes a week and
working full time in IT.” It was 2010, and Mary
led an enjoyable life with her husband and
two daughters, 9 and 11 at the time. She had
no family history of breast cancer.
One morning at age 45, Mary was in the
shower and found a lump. “The very next day,
I went to get a mammogram.” Despite
her quick action, the results didn’t
come quite as promptly. “The
machine couldn’t pick it up.
You could feel the lump; it was
palpable. But the machine could
not detect it because I
have very dense breast
tissue.”
Breast density, according to Susan G.
Komen, is a measure
of the proportion of
tissues that make up
a woman’s breasts. It
measures not physical
density, but fat and breast
tissue as they appear on a mammogram.
The less fatty tissue there is, the higher
your breast density. “It’s really important for
women to find out what their breast density is,” Mary notes. “When you have dense
breasts, it’s very hard for the radiologist to
see cancer on a mammogram. Dense breast
tissue displays as white, and a tumor does
too. Whereas fatty breast tissue looks dark
on a mammogram, a tumor comes off as
white – it’s very noticeable.”
Because of the mammogram’s inability to
see the lump, Mary got an ultrasound
and an MRI. “It turns out it was
just that one lump, and I ended
up getting a needle biopsy with