Pictures of Breast Cancer

Here are some images you might want to familiarize yourself with if you have breast cancer

Pictures of breast cancer serve several purposes. Mainly, when you are diagnosed with breast cancer, doctors are throwing terms at you:

• Mammogram
• Chemotherapy
• Radiation

It's hard to learn what each of these mean if you've never heard them before. It's even harder to know what each of these things look like

You can find those images here if you're curious what a radiation machine or what a typical cancer patient's mammogram image looks like. Looking at these pictures of breast cancer can help you better prepare for what lies ahead

A nurse is helping a woman prepare for her annual mammogram in this photo. The mammogram machine shown here will compress each breast. Then the machine will take a mild X-ray image (mammogram machines are not as strong as normal X-ray machines for a reason). This low-dose of radiation will help to create a picture of the tissues inside the breast. This allows the doctors to look for any changes or problems in your breast that may indicate breast cancer.

The machine has to compress the breast so that the X-ray will show the most detail possible. Since breast tissue is so dense, it is important to flatten it out a bit during the mammogram. This will be done with plates pressing from the top and bottom and ones pressing from each side as well.

It is important to make a mammogram part of your annual physical after menopause. Catching breast cancer early will give you a better chance at beating the disease.

When you have a mammogram or a "low-dose" breast X-ray, the resulting image might look like this. This is an X-ray image of the breast. You can see the tumor in the breast tissue. Compared to the tissue around it, the tumor is white and denser. It is clearly different from the rest of the breast tissue.

This is what doctors look for when they are studying your mammogram results. If they find a tumor like this, or other irregularities, they will let you know. You might have a biopsy done to see if the tumor is cancerous or not. If it does turn out to be breast cancer, you will have to start treatments immediately based on what stage of cancer you have.

In this photo, a woman is receiving radiation treatment for her breast cancer. This treatment is a way to specifically target and kill off cancer cells.

Radiation is often combined with other treatments such as surgery to remove a tumor in your breast. Then the doctor might recommend following up with a certain amount of radiation therapy.

"Knowing what lies ahead will help you deal with your cancer." With follow-ups like these, you can help make sure the cancer is gone-and that it stays that way.

Radiation may not be as helpful if you have an advanced stage of breast cancer because radiation is targeted at a specific area. You may need to have radiation daily for the treatment to work. This is a huge time commitment that can be hard to make but you must try.

Radiation is widely used and may work well for you.

Here is what the lymphatic system looks like. You have probably heard of that system before through other essays on our website. The lymphatic system plays a key role in allowing breast cancer to spread throughout the body.

The lymphatic system carries white blood cells throughout the body through a network of arteries. There are places where the cells pool called lymph nodes. The lymphatic system can serve as a highway for the cells to travel when cancer cells are multiplying

Swollen lymph nodes, especially the ones closest to the breast and under the arm, can mean the breast cancer has spread to those lymph nodes. Talk to your doctor if you think your lymph nodes are swollen.

In addition to these pictures of breast cancer, there are many more pictures of breast cancer online. You can view the anatomy of a breast, as well as what a sentinel node biopsy does here. You can also find a variety of breast cancer pictures here, such as diagrams of:

• different breast cancer stages,
• treatments and
• breast self-exams.

TIME online also recorded a breast cancer photo essay when one victim wanted her story told. This photo essay follows the woman in her fight against breast cancer.

You can find breast cancer photos at this site, but the images may be too graphic for some people. Be careful.

You can always browse online for pictures of breast cancer. This may help to prepare you for what is to come. Mary Ann Nilan, the woman in the photo essay for TIME even said, "If I had seen this photo from the beginning, a lot of my anxiety would have been gone."

Knowing what lies ahead will help you deal with your cancer.