Claire Warner was simply checking her Facebook newsfeed when she saw that one of her friends had shared a Daily Mail article about a woman, Lisa Royle, who discovered she had breast cancer after finding small dimples on the sides of her breasts.
These tiny dimples aren’t common symptoms of breast cancer – it’s more common that women begin to find abnormal lumps in their breasts – and are quite easy to miss because of their size.
The article about Royle’s experience as well as her insistence that all women check their own breasts for this subtly was enough to prompt Warner to check her own breasts, because she remembered, perhaps, she’d seen something similar on her own breasts.
Sure enough, when Warner checked, she also found a slight dimple in her left breast.
Warner immediately went to the doctor to get a biopsy done, and she was correct. “The miniscule dimple…is a rare and little-known symptom of BREAST CANCER,” she wrote on her Facebook page. “Blink and you’d miss it. I only spotted it thanks to another post by an amazing friend.”
Royle was lucky enough to have caught her cancer in its earliest stages. After having a mastectomy, her doctors determined her to be cancer-free.
Warner is still on her road to recovery, but she’s hopeful that her story will have as happy an ending as Royle’s. “[The cancer] is one small contained lump and after surgery, chemo, radio therapy, I’ve every hope of being cured,” she wrote.
Like Royle, Warner has also posted publicly on her Facebook page about her experience. She hopes that by continuing to spread awareness about this symptom of breast cancer, more and more women will be able to discover their symptoms sooner and begin receiving treatment at an earlier stage of the disease.
Warner’s post has since been shared 16,000 times online. With any luck, her and Royle’s stories will be able to help many women catch their breast cancer symptoms and stop the disease from progressing into later, more advanced stages.