On a fall day in 2012, 35-year-old Tara Smalley was watching “The View” when Barbara Walters introduced a topic that grabbed her attention — breast cancer screening. “I started thinking about it. A lot of people in my family have gotten cancer very young, and my grandmother on my dad’s side had breast cancer.” When she told her doctor about her family’s cancer history, Tara was quickly referred to the Marvelle Koffler Breast Centre (MKBC) at Mount Sinai Hospital, part of Sinai Health System, to have her risk assessed. Because of their strong family history, she and her sister, Nicole, were both eligible for early screening, including both mammograms and breast MRIs. Annual screening quickly became a reassuring routine. So 44year-old Nicole Smalley-Lester had no worries when she walked into the MKBC for her appointment on February 6, 2017. That started to change on February 7, when Nicole’s family doctor called on behalf of the MKBC staff team. Nicole’s mammogram had been clear, but her MRI detected a suspicious mass. “She told me it was probably nothing,” Nicole recalls. “But the fact that they reached out so quickly made me wonder.” When Nicole returned to Mount Sinai the following week, she learned that the mass was a tumour, and that it was almost certainly cancer. On February 21, she was officially diagnosed with aggressive stage 2 “triple negative” breast cancer — a type of tumour that needs to
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P H O T O S B Y: J O H N PA C K M A N
BY H EATH E R GI BSON
