2024 mobile mammography by the numbers
WEBSTER, SD
6,326
As a registered nurse, Mary Bullert knows the importance of annual mammograms, but that doesn’t mean she was always eager to schedule hers. “To be perfectly honest, mammograms scared me,” says Bullert. She doesn’t like the waiting period between getting the mammogram and getting the results. Some years, Bullert was on top of her annual appointment, taking care of it right on time. But other years, she’d push it a bit, adding a couple extra months before she got herself there. Because of her dense breast tissue, Bullert would typically go to Sioux Falls for her mammograms. “It’s just easier for doctors with the 3D scan,” she says. 3D mammography is the most advanced breast imaging technology. It takes detailed images of breast tissue slices to find the earliest signs of cancer. But, in 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bullert couldn’t get to Sioux Falls. By the time she realized she was overdue, it was by about six months. Luckily, it wasn’t long before a colleague of hers in the radiology department at Sanford Webster Medical Center mentioned the mobile mammography unit was planning a stop in their town.
Like usual, her breast tissue was too dense to see through. Doctors told her she’d need an ultrasound. During the ultrasound, Bullert was astonished. “I could tell the wand was going up and over something,” she says. “I don’t know how I didn’t realize it was there.” Soon after, Bullert was diagnosed with breast cancer. She underwent chemotherapy and radiation and chose to have a double mastectomy. “If the mobile unit hadn’t come to Webster, I don’t know when I would’ve been able to go to Sioux Falls,” she says. “My surgeon, Dr. Jesse Dirksen, told me that waiting six more months could have been a whole different story.” Now, five years later, Bullert is cancer- free and thriving. She stays busy as a mother to four and a grandmother to eight. She’s looking forward to retirement but still enjoys her work as a nurse. “I’m just glad that I feel good and going to work is my decision, not my health’s decision.”
mammograms
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PERFORMED
A cancer diagnosis answers generations-old question When Jaime Franken felt a lump in her breast, she wrote it off as scar tissue from a surgery a few years earlier. But she couldn’t get it completely off her mind. Her mother died at age 39 from cancer. So did her grandmother. And Franken was 41. “I kept it to myself for a couple of weeks,” says Franken. “Then I told my sisters, and they kept asking me about it.” She was terrified of going to the doctor, but Franken decided to go in and get the lump checked out. She was shocked when her doctor told her she had breast cancer.
CANCER 34
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“That was my biggest fear,” she says.
Following her diagnosis, doctors did a PET scan to ensure the breast cancer hadn’t metastasized anywhere else in her body. “I remember them saying if it had metastasized, that would be considered stage four,” says Franken. “And it would be treatable, but not curable.” The good news was that the PET scan revealed her breast cancer hadn’t spread. But there was a mass in her abdomen that her doctors wanted to look at a little closer.
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Bullert scheduled an appointment right away.
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