Mammograms are not fun. At best, they’re very uncomfortable, and at worst they can be incredibly painful. There’s the added ordeal of dropping your thin hospital gown so a stranger can arrange your cleavage while you pose by command, becoming a topless model for photos nobody wants to see: “Lean this way! Tilt your chin! Hold your breath!” And then your décolletage gets flattened like a pancake.

Honor Gifford acknowledges that the procedure isn’t great. But she doesn’t mind mammograms anymore.

“I am completely accepting of what I have to go through,” said the 57-year-old program manager, who lives in Howard County. “Instead of complaining about getting my breast squished, I think ‘Thank God I have a chance to do this.’”

Gifford’s world changed when she was diagnosed with Stage 1 breast cancer after a routine mammogram in March 2020.

Like the late icon Olivia Newton-John, who died of the disease in 2022, Gifford has made it her mission to talk about her fight. “If just one person reads this and says ‘I’m gonna go get my mammogram,’ I’ll have done my job,” she said.

She, like every cancer survivor I know, has the exact date of her diagnosis burned in her brain. I barely got the question out when Gifford responded almost automatically, “April 20, 2020, at 12:41.”

That was when the call came in with the results of what had been a normal procedure at the very beginning of the the COVID pandemic. “They found something suspicious and recommended a biopsy,” she was surprised to learn.

“It was a real shock. I wasn’t expecting it,” said Gifford, who has no family history of breast cancer.

She was diagnosed early with a non-aggressive tumor, so a lumpectomy was considered elective. And because the world was still in the initial throes of the pandemic, elective surgeries were postponed. This is not what you want to hear.

“I had to wait three months,” Gifford said. “There were days when I was like ‘I just want this over with.’” Her anxiety was compounded by her diagnosed depression and the fact that she had to taper off one anti-depressant and start a new one because the former didn’t work well with the hormone suppressors needed before her surgery.

“It was a very dark period,” she said.

Fortunately, things got better after her lumpectomy. And she never really asked herself why this happened to her. “I don’t have time to deal with whys. I only had time to deal with healing,” Gifford said. “I’m a faithful person. I didn’t even ask for healing, but the strength to get through the journey.”

Her diagnosis had become more than just an acknowledgement of her cancer. “It was the wake-up call I needed to focus on my health, to eat a more healthy diet and to exercise regularly.”

About 20 years ago, Gifford had been an avid runner, but her habits changed, and she stopped running and gained weight. One of her doctors mentioned that obesity was linked to cancer, and that as low as her chance of recurrence was, losing weight might make it even lower.

Gifford began her efforts with doctors from Johns Hopkins, “but nothing was really working,” she said. In 2021, she had bariatric surgery. “I started out really slow. I lost 40 pounds and by November 2022, I got into good enough shape to start running.”

Three years ago, she hit the road again, first walking and then working with a running coach. She celebrated her return to the sport with two races this year, including the half-marathon at last month’s Baltimore Running Festival.

“It was amazing. Baltimore really showed up and showed out,” Gifford said. “I think it was the first race I’ve ever done where I was in the back of the middle. Usually, I’m in the back of the back. If you had told me three years ago, I would have completed two halves in one year and a 23-mile race, I would have said you’re crazy. Now I’m the one who’s crazy!”

Gifford reminded me of another friend who changed their life after a heart attack at 44. She changed what she ate, how often she worked out and how she managed her stress to ensure survival. This is, in part, why I write this column: to introduce you to everyday people whose lives might resemble — and — could save yours.

Gifford acknowledges that mammograms, and health care in general, are a privilege. “I actually believe health care should be universal,” she told me, and I agree. In a time when the government is ostensibly shut down over whether millions of Americans should lose their access, she knows that everyone cannot get such potentially life-saving tests.

“The worse the diagnosis, the longer the journey, which is why it’s so important to offer them to women, and even to men,” she said.

Breast self-examinations are of course crucial, but Gifford’s lump was so small that the doctors could not feel it. If she had not had the mammogram, she said, “who knows how long it would have had to grow, how large the tumor would have gotten.”

So while Gifford knows it might not be possible financially to get a mammogram, she hopes that if you can, you do.

“Let’s all be survivors,” she said.