Lakeitha Rousseau had spent two decades as a registered nurse telling other people to get screened when she started hearing it about herself.
“I had just this little voice saying you need a mammogram,” she said.
She went. In 2015, at 37, she was diagnosed with Stage 1 breast cancer. “I had a moment, but I went into fighter mode at that point,” she said.
The numbers underneath her story are the reason she keeps telling it. Black women are diagnosed with breast cancer 5 percent less often than white women, and they die of it 38 percent more often, by the American Cancer Society’s count. Fewer diagnoses. More deaths.
Rousseau has no patience for the reason she hears most often from women who have not gone. “A lot of people be like, I don’t want to know,” she said. “Why don’t you want to know?”
Her instruction, when it finally arrives, does not come with a hedge on it.
“Girl,” she said, “get that mammogram.”
