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Touchy Health Topics for Teens
A Resource for Parents and Teens
By Kelly Burgess
When Jan Goldberg's 15-year-old daughter told her she'd found a lump in her breast, Goldberg was pretty calm – until her daughter, Kristin, said she'd found it three months previously. "That just put me over the edge," says Goldberg, of Parsippany, N.J. "All her life I've tried to be sure she knew she could talk to me about anything, and here she worried herself sick for three months, looking on the Internet for information – which of course was all about breast cancer – and thinking she was going to die, but keeping it to herself. I couldn't believe that she waited so long. What if this had been something really serious?"
In Kristin's case it wasn't serious, just fibrocystic breasts, which are fairly common. But the reasons she didn't come to her mom right away were more complex. It was a combination of embarrassment, worry that she was overreacting and her fear that she may be giving her mom devastating news. "I just thought it was cancer and didn't want to be the one to tell her that I was dying," she says. "I finally told her because I didn't know what else to do; I couldn't just keep reading about it forever and wondering. Of course, now I know, but I was just confused."
Breast lumps in teens are almost never something to be concerned about, says Dr. Andrea Marks, a specialist in adolescent medicine and author of Healthy Teens, Body and Soul: A Parent's Complete Guide (Diane Pub Co., 2004). However, while it may be hard for a teen to approach a parent about an embarrassing problem, it's absolutely necessary to rule out anything serious.
"I realize that these are sensitive issues to discuss, and the girl who doesn't tell her parents about a lump in the breast will probably be fine, but the boy who doesn't tell his parents about a lump in his testicle may not be," Dr. Marks says.