Dressed in all pink, Madeline Jimenez grinned just moments after her annual mammogram.
“You need to shake your boobies, no matter what!” she said.
The mammogram experience was easy and convenient for Jimenez. She only had to walk a few feet from her office building’s front door. It’s the goal of the man who started mobile mammograms in Tampa Bay.
“Early detection saves women’s lives and saving women’s lives is a good thing,” said Tampa Bay Mobile Mammography founder Bill Yovic. “We look at it in terms of when we save a woman’s life we save a sister, a mother, an aunt, a wife.
"All those things get saved.”
Yovic had no family history of breast cancer when he decided to start up his company in 1995. What began with one bus and a few dozen patients has grown to three buses and an organization that scans 1,100 women for breast cancer each month.
Most patients admit that they wouldn’t get scanned if the bus didn’t arrive at their workplace. Getting time off from their jobs was too difficult to get those health checks done.
“I just recently had my mother who passed and through her passing I learned that it’s very important to take care of yourself, keep up on your testing and stuff and make sure, so you can catch stuff early,” said Deputy Donna Williams, who got a mammogram when the bus visited the Orient Road Jail Monday morning.
Her co-worker, Diane Gunnell, said the same thing. She had gone three years without a check-up.
“It’s been about two or three years since I’d had a mammography and it was because I had a bad experience one time and you just shy away from it. You don’t want to go back,” she said. “But, this one, it was very good.”
One in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime. Even without a family history of cancer, it’s recommended that women over 40 get checked annually.
“It’s important for me because I have two sisters who already have breast cancer and I need to take care of myself,” said Jimenez.
The Tampa Bay Mobile Mammography bus does 3-D scans and accepts most insurances. The exams take a few minutes. Only one patient is scanned at a time by an experienced mammographer.
To schedule an appointment, visit the TBMM website.
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