Early Breast Screening Saves Lives. Cancer Survivor Leona Fleming is Living Proof.
Published Wednesday, October 15, 2025
Early breast cancer screening saves lives. All eligible people 40 to 74 can self-refer. To find the closest breast screening program to you in Northwestern Ontario including the Screen for Life Coach, visit: www.bit.ly/tbbcscreening
Leona Fleming makes it hauntingly clear: “If I would have had to wait until I was 50 to get a mammogram, I wouldn't be here.”
On October 8, 2024, the Ministry of Health dropped the self-referral age for breast screening from 50 to 40. The move allowed almost a million more women, men, Two-Spirit, transgender, and non-binary people 40 to 74 in Ontario to self-refer for breast screening.
The fact that Leona has a 26-year-old daughter makes dropping the age even more important to her.
“Breast screening saves lives,” Leona said. “It's absolutely wonderful they dropped the age. We will save more women now that the screening guidelines have changed. I'm living proof of that.”
Early detection of breast cancer means faster, less invasive treatment and higher success rates. For example, the relative five-year survival rate for women with Stage 1 breast cancer is 100% and 92.8% for women with Stage 2 breast cancer, according to Cancer Care Ontario.
Leona first felt her lump in 2016. At that time, self-referral wasn't an option because of her age. Her family physician wasn't available, so she went to a walk-in clinic.
“I told him, something just doesn't feel right. The doctor wasn't worried because I was young without a family history of breast cancer,” Leona said. “He referred me for a mammogram just to be safe.”
As it turned out, Leona was lucky that he did. Both the walk-in clinic doctor and her own family physician called Leona the same day, wanting to see her for a follow-up consultation about the results.
“I figured it must be something serious…”
“Serious” doesn't even begin to describe Leona's life-threatening ordeal, which she talked about as the Keynote Speaker at the Foundation's inaugural Chase the Case Event this past spring. The lump everyone thought was benign turned out to be an aggressive tumour. Leona went through treatment immediately including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy. Although treatment was a long, difficult process with many complications, she knows catching her breast cancer early enough saved her life.
Now, Leona actively encourages all women to take advantage of early screening by self-referring to the Linda Buchan Centre at the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre or any other breast screening program in Northwestern Ontario. Not only could it save your life, it's part of advocating for your own health, she said.
“If you go on say your 40th birthday, even if they don't find anything, now you have a baseline. So down the road, if something does develop, then they can compare with those images from before.”
Thanks to donors to the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Foundation, there are more diagnostic imaging options than ever. Leona said that doctors warned her long ago that her dense breast tissue could make finding lumps more difficult. But today, advanced imaging techniques like breast MRI and tomosynthesis (TS) – basically a mammography CT scanner – can help find those tumours even earlier, including for women with dense breast tissue.
In fact those tools are so advanced, the current computer systems at the Linda Buchan Centre can't keep up. You can donate to the Foundation right now to help increase computing power to help process and analyze those images faster so women don't have to wait as long for results.
“I'm so thankful we can get care here at home,” Leona said. “Mammography is a simple, easy and safe test to get done. I want women to take care of themselves – it's time to put ourselves first for the screening. The life we saved by getting screened could be our own.”
Help more women get their breast screening results earlier! Donate today at: healthsciencesfoundation.ca/breastcancer
Article By: Graham Strong