I have had 2 biopsies and averted a 3rd on Valentine's Day (2023) because I flat-out refused to go through with another one of these things IF they could, instead, gather my yearly mammograms and check to see if the calcification that is present had changed in any way. My first biopsy on the right breast was in 2018. I was called back after my yearly mammogram for what I thought was a re-do involving the mammogram machine. I did not know they were going to ask me to strip to the waist, lay flat with my breasts dangling down through what looked like a Medievel torture machine, and approach me with a needle that easily was as long as the distance between my elbow and my wrist. I had stripped to the waist and "dangled," but when I saw that needle, I sat up abruptly and said, "Wait a minute! I want to talk to a doctor." The woman (Jane) who had put me in at 7 a.m. (just shoot me now) began bullying me further, suggesting that if I was too frightened to have the procedure done, I should just sit up and put my clothes back on, I wish I had,. Instead, they rounded up a radiologist, who agreed, after looking at the large blow up of the mammogram on the big screen, that I could probably just come back in 6 months and see if there had been any change in the calcification in that time. I WISH I HAD. Instead, since Jane was such a harridan, I said, "Let's just get it over with" and let them plunge this really long (and painful) needle into my right breast. The results of this were benign. However, in 3 years, that breast (right) was the one on which I had the lumpectomy, after a second biopsy--done a totally different way---was performed in Davenport, Iowa, at Genesus Hospital. The first 2018 biopsy did not heal for literally months and, when I asked her for a second thing to put in my freezer for when the first one had lost its iciness, she said, "You can make your own" and refused to give me a second ice pack, What a gal! I was so upset by this woman's treatment of me that I actually sat down and wrote the hospital, which never responded. Later, I found out from my surgeon that they did have a meeting about "Jane," who apparently had had other complaints of her Helga the Stomping Mare demeanor, In December of 2021 (Pearl Harbor Day) I drove all the way to Iowa (from Illinois) to have my mammogram at what used to be called St. Luke's Hospital, because I hated the first hospital that treated me so shabbily. I told the supervising radiologist, Dr. Goswami, about my horrible experience of 2018 and she said, "Oh, we don't do them THAT way any more" and showed me a needle with what looked like a pig's tail (curly-cue). She guaranteed me that, after the area was numbed, it wouldn't hurt much and would heal in record time, both of which turned out to be true. The radiologist, when asked if it couldn't simply be a cyst, replied, "No, because it's hard." She was right. It was cancerous and the 11 mm, tumor was removed on 1/27/2022. When I had an ultra sound on the one-year anniversary of surgery that showed something there, they wanted to do another stereotactic biopsy, which would be an instant replay of 2018. By now I knew enough to ask if we couldn't simply gather all of my mammograms, faithfully taken from age 40 on, and look for changes in the calcification that shows up in both breasts. That radiologist here in Texas agreed that that was another approach and I did not have my 3rd biopsy. The mammograms---which took a while to gather---showed no changes in either breast over time. I still wonder if the stereotactic biopsy was instrumental in causing the formation of the tumor in the first place. It was very painful and didn't heal for months and I did not want to ever have to go back to Trinity Hospital in Moline, Illinois--although that is exactly where I ended up for surgery because it was the closest to my home and I was told to have 33 radiation treatment, which also seems like a lot for a 76-year-old woman. Iowa City Hospitals and Laboratories told me, THREE DAYS before the radiation was to commence, that, if I had had my surgery there instead of at Trinity Hospital in Moline, they would not have radiated me at all, because I was a woman in my 70s, (Makes you wonder,)