Can we talk? I’ve got something on my chest.

Count me among Kate’s colleagues who are flummoxed by this report. I think it proves that even scientists can be pinheads. My issue is not with their recommendations on when and how often women should get mammograms. That seems worthy of debate. What I don’t get is their finding that women should not even do self-examinations. And why? Because if we find a lump, it might make us worried. Congresswoman and cancer survivor Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was right on the mark when she said this represents a “very patronizing attitude that these scientists have taken…It’s pretty outrageous to suggest that women couldn’t handle more information.”

That got me thinking a bit about my own history, which on one level might seem to vindicate these findings. I’m a cancer survivor; it has been almost 22 years since I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, which required surgical removal of my thyroid, followed by two years of radioactive iodine. I was lucky, especially given the fact that the lump in my thyroid had been there for eight years, misdiagnosed as benign.

But breast cancer was my first big scare–at age 19, when I discovered lumps in both my breasts that didn’t go away after a couple of menstrual cycles.