July 5 (UPI) — Former U.S. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., has revealed she was was diagnosed with breast cancer.
In an X post, she wrote, “I just became one of the 300,000 women per year who are diagnosed with breast cancer. The good news is that it was discovered early and I had a successful lumpectomy on Tuesday.”
She explained that she had a mammogram in June of 2023 and nearly decided to skip the annual exam this year due to a busy summer.
“The lesson here is, please be diligent about your own screenings and don’t skip them,” she wrote.
Speier said she received excellent care from UC San Francisco surgeon Dr. Laura Esserman and radiologists Dr. Kimberly Ray and Dr. Alissa Price.
Speier announced in November 2021 she would not seek re-election.
She represented California’s 4th District of San Mateo County and the Peninsula.
Speier was shot five times during the 1978 Jonestown Massacre that left 909 people dead in Guyana.
Rep. Leo Ryan was killed in the shooting. Speier was working as an aide to Ryan in 1978. They were in Guyana to investigate human rights abuses at a camp run by cult leader Jim Jones.
Also, Speier, who said she had been harassed while working as a young staffer at the Capitol, introduced the Me Too Congress Act.
Breast cancer treatments have made advances despite the number of diagnoses made each year.
A new trial June 28 of the immunotherapy/chemotherapy combo drug Kadcyla found it can help breast cancer patients remain cancer-free following treatment.
The drug helps inhibit early HER2-positive cancers by blocking a protein that fuels the cancer.
A report in early June found that artificial intelligence can improve doctor assessments of mammogram screenings.
The report in the journal Radiology found AI-assisted mammography detected significantly more breast cancers and had a lower false-positive rate.