On April 24, 1990, Sherry Kohlenberg was in the shower thinking about a conversation she had with a friend a few days before. The friend had lost her mother and grandmother to breast cancer. She told Sherry that the only elective surgery she would consider was prophylactic (preventative) mastectomy.
With a sinking feeling, Sherry felt a hard lump under her arm. Once out of the shower, she had her husband, Larry Goldman, feel it too. She called her doctor and set-up an appointment for that day.
Two doctors examined her and asked if she had noticed any changes in her breast scar tissue - she had a benign excisional breast biopsy ten years before. Her doctors thought it was larger than at her last exam in November 1989.
That same day she went for a mammogram and met with a surgeon. Larry joined her.
The radiologist and surgeon found the lumps to be suspicious and performed a fine needle aspiration. Ten minutes later, the surgeon returned and told the couple to sit down. It was breast cancer - in both the lymph node and in the breast.
"I couldn't believe it, I was sitting in a tiny exam room and someone was telling me I had cancer. My husband and I held each other. He was brave, I cried," recalled Kohlenberg to Virginia Woman magazine.
