About 1 in 8 U.S. women (about 12%) will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime. What a crazy high number. But I am still left asking, WHY ME? I mean, I am “young” (41 still counts). I birthed three kids. I breastfed those rugrats. I have no family history. I work out (yes, yoga is considered exercise). I eat kale for goodness sakes. I did not think twice about going in for that routine mammogram. I never considered I would be in that 12%. It couldn’t happen to me. But it did.

It is humbling to think that that mammogram saved my life. So why are current recommendations moving away from annual testing for younger women?

From the medical standpoint, I get it. Per the latest U.S. Preventative Task Force recommendations, clinical trials have found that to prevent one breast cancer death, 1,904 women between the ages of 40 to 49 would need to be screened with mammography. Yes, it’s costly, time-consuming, with many false positives, and often leads to identification of non-invasive tumors that never progress. And even then, it sometimes doesn’t even catch proliferative cancers in dense breast tissue.

Yet when you are that ONE person, it’s hard to make that argument. So thank you to all the women that have ever had a false-positive mammogram which led to a nerve-wracking biopsy. Thank you to those who lost sleep because they had to have a follow-up ultrasound, which proved negative. Thank you — because I am the one whose life it saved, and I do not take that for granted.