Bottled Up

DRINKING MAY HAVE GIVEN ME CANCER. THE ALCOHOL INDUSTRY WORKED HARD TO DOWNPLAY THE RISK.

- Stephanie Mencimer

I THOUGHT I’D DONE everything right: breastfeeding my children, a careful diet, plenty of exercises. I wasn’t overweight and didn’t have a family history. I bought BPA-free bottles for my filtered water. But on a visit to the radiology department last spring, a pair of red brackets highlighted something worrisome on the ultrasound monitor.

Invasive lobular carcinoma—a malignant breast tumor. This spidery little beast measuring nearly three centimeters meant I had stage 2 cancer.

At 47, I was a decade and a half younger than the median age for breast cancer diagnosis in the United States. Was this just bad luck? Maybe, but the journalist in me was still curious to know: Why me? So I dug into the literature on risk factors to see where I might have fit in. It’s an impossible question to answer definitively for an individual, like trying to prove that a single weather event was caused by climate change. As one doctor told me, “You know who’s at risk for getting breast cancer? People with breasts!”

Still, most of the broad indicators didn’t seem to apply to me. The biggest one is age: The median diagnosis in the United States is at 62, and the highest breast cancer rates are in women older than 70. Another is taking hormone replacement therapy after menopause, but I’m premenopausal and haven’t taken it. Obesity raises risk, but I’ve never been overweight.

Then I saw one that gave me pause: alcohol consumption. I’m not a heavy drinker, but like most women I know, I have consumed a lot of alcohol in my lifetime.