At the centre of care

Diana Ip and her husband had been trying to conceive for years – first naturally and later through fertility treatments – when she found a lump in her breast in October of 2021. The discovery came at an especially precarious time: she had one embryo left and was six weeks away from her final fertility treatment. At nearly 40 years old, and after years of failed attempts, she and her husband planned to give up if this time was unsuccessful.

Like many women, Diana was in the shower when she first felt the small, hard lump just under the skin of her right breast. It didn’t hurt, but she was sure it hadn’t been there the day before. Concerned, she called her doctor and booked an ultrasound. 

“Initially my doctor told me, ‘You’re young, you don’t have a family history of breast cancer, I’m not worried about it,’” Diana recalls, adding that the results came back as “likely benign.”

Diana wasn’t convinced. She continued to worry about the lump, subconsciously feeling for it, the same way you keep going back to a loose tooth. According to Statistics Canada, one in eight Canadian women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime, so it was only natural for Diana’s anxiety to kick into high gear.

Then, a friend, who is a breast cancer survivor herself, recommended seeing Dr. Crystal Pallister, a general surgeon at the Breast Health Centre at Oak Valley Health’s Markham Stouffville Hospital to get a second opinion. That’s how Diana discovered that the lump was, in fact, malignant.

“I am so grateful that Dr. Pallister was willing to look at it,” she says. “I can’t imagine if we had waited, to be honest, and all the things that I would’ve had to go through.”