19/10/2025
She found her own lump during self breast examination. She saved her life by God giving her that intuition to check her breast!!
In 2020, Jessica Katawick woke up with the sense that she needed to do a breast self-exam. At only 37 years old, the Kettering Health Labor and Delivery nurse wasn’t yet doing routine mammograms, but she had the feeling that something was off.
“In that moment,” she says, “I knew something intervened to tell me to check.”
In the shower, Jessica felt what she knew would be there: a lump in her right breast.
After a mammogram, ultrasound, and biopsy, Jessica was visited by her care team while at work at Soin Medical Center. They told Jessica she had triple-positive invasive lobular breast cancer and arranged for her to go home early.
But Jessica stayed.
“When I was in my patients’ rooms,” she says, “I was normal. I wasn’t sick.”
Throughout her treatment—six rounds of chemotherapy, 15 rounds of immunosuppressive therapy, 25 rounds of radiation, and a double mastectomy—Jessica continued to work and care for her patients. She found that it kept her mind busy, keeping her from focusing on the negative.
Today, Jessica is in remission with clear scans. She thanks all of her coworkers for being there for her during treatment, acknowledging that it “takes a village” when fighting cancer. She also encourages everyone to get their routine screenings and listen to their bodies when something isn’t right.