That’s what I’ve been saying for nearly two decades as the face of Buddy Check 9, WUSA-TV’s breast cancer awareness program. It began 19 years ago in partnership with the Prevent Cancer Foundation and Georgetown University Hospital.

Since the start, I’ve heard from scores of women and men who say after hearing my reminders on the 9th of each month, they do perform monthly breast self exams, get annual mammograms and schedule appointments for clinical exams. Some have even credited me with saving their lives.

Recently my colleague, local broadcast news icon JC Hayward, thanked me for being a faithful breast cancer advocate because the message hit home for her.

While on a cruise through South America, breast cancer interrupted JC’s time in paradise. Always in excellent health, she was proud that she wasn’t always one to run straight to a doctor’s office. And JC was only a “some-timer” when it came to early detection. Yet when she noticed something in her right breast, her gut reaction was that it wasn’t quite right. That nagging feeling did not go away when she came back to the U.S. Upon returning to work, she called me to her office and asked me what I thought. There was definitely something there, so I advised her to see an expert. She called breast surgeon Dr. Colette Magnant’s office. The following day JC was having a mammogram. That was Tuesday.

Wednesday she received the news no woman wants to hear. “You have breast cancer.”

Initially, she didn’t want to tell anyone—not me, not even her best “peeps,” as she calls her dearest friends. But she did tell me and I encouraged her to go public. That was Thursday.

Friday, I was with her live on-set as JC Hayward, anchorwoman, legend and “Buddy” looked directly into the camera and invited her family of viewers to join her on her breast cancer journey. She encouraged them to follow her lead and make early detection a regular part of their health care.

Immediately the word spread like wildfire on social media. Her JC Hayward.com website flooded with 100,000 hits. Sibley Hospital saw a jump in appointments for mammograms directly related to JC’s announcement, and I was getting calls for Buddy Check 9 reminder packets. In just a few hours she had become a powerful catalyst for change, especially among the city’s African-American women who have the highest mortality rate in the nation.

On Monday, I was with JC and her other “peeps” when she learned her cancer was invasive ductal carcinoma, a stage one or two, non-aggressive, estrogen receptor positive. An MRI that same day also detected a second lump. Radiologist Dr. Rebecca Zuurbier, Director of Breast Imagining at Sibley, located and removed the pea sized lesion during an Ultra Sound Guided Core Biopsy. The pathology report came back negative. It was benign.

Now JC had a decision to make–lumpectomy or mastectomy?  Because her breast cancer was detected early, she did have a choice. She chose a lumpectomy.

One week after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, JC’s tumor was removed and the news was all good. Both the tumor and mass had clear margins—and no surprises. Early detection had made a critical difference. Early detection gave JC control over her breast cancer, not the other way around. My Buddy JC  Hayward is saving lives, by example.

Watch Andrea’s interview with JC:

Andrea Roane is now in her 31st year with WUSA-TV 9. Ms. Roane is best known to viewers for her passionate reporting on breast health issues and promoting the importance of early detection in the fight against breast cancer through the Buddy Check 9 program. She currently serves as a Sustaining Director on the Prevent Cancer Foundation’s Board of Directors.

Donna Gutierrez, a home mortgage broker in Virginia, was living the fast life. A single mother with two grown children, she barely ate anything and kept long hours at work. “I lived off of coffee and cigarettes,” Gutierrez admits. Her hectic, commission-based job left her with no time for friends and barely enough time for family. “It didn’t mean anything to me to work 12 to 14 or even 16 hours a day.” The self-described workaholic hadn’t taken a vacation in eight years.

But in December of 2006, all that changed when she performed her routine breast self-exam. “I found a palpable lump,” she says.  A week later, she found herself celebrating Christmas and New Year’s Eve wondering about the results of the biopsy. “Both kids were home for the holidays,” Gutierrez recalls, “I kept a happy face on.”

In early January of 2007, the results were confirmed: Donna Gutierrez had cancer. But she handled the diagnosis well. “I never cried,” Gutierrez remembers. “I said ‘okay — what’s the solution here?’”

But when her health care provider suggested that she change her lifestyle and “slow down a bit,” Gutierrez was shocked. “That upset me more than being told I had cancer!”

Gutierrez had a lumpectomy. When she was about to start chemotherapy — she knew she was going to lose her long blonde hair, so she took an aggressive approach and had her hair cut really short. By the time her chemotherapy had finished in June and her 32 rounds of radiation were completed in August, Gutierrez had decided to make some major changes in her life.

Today, slightly more than a year after her cancer treatments ended, Gutierrez calls her cancer diagnosis “a spiritual awakening.”

“It really reprioritized everything for me,” she says. “I hadn’t been taking care of myself and cancer was a wake-up call.”

“When you’re in your 20s and 30s you think you’re invincible, nothing is ever going to happen to you,” Gutierrez says — but now, at age 52, she’s taking precautions for a healthier life.

Gutierrez quit smoking and is trying to eat more healthy foods — no longer grabbing fast food on her way home from work. “I allow myself to rest and not feel guilty,” she admits. “I’ve learned that I can still be as productive and spend less time doing work. I’ve created new friends… I’ve discovered another dimension to life that’s better than what I had.”

If watching her mother have a radical mastectomy, her father suffer from kidney cancer and her brother struggle with multiple myeloma taught Grace Bender anything, it was to pay attention to her health and ever-evolving medical technology.

“I read a lot about health issues because of my interest in helping people become their own health advocates. To help them, I have produced a product, mymedmanager^TM, a health care and medication organizer,” says Bender, age 62.

“Last October, I read that MRI breast scans were the best way to detect breast cancer especially in women with large, dense breasts, and a family history of breast cancer,” recalls Bender.

Knowing that she had dense breasts and a family history of breast cancer, Bender took action and had an MRI done. “The scan showed three small spots in different areas of one breast. My doctor then ordered a mammogram, which showed nothing, and an ultrasound, which showed only two spots. At that point my doctor ordered an MRI biopsy,” she says.

The biopsy showed that all three small spots were malignant and she was advised to have the entire breast removed. “With tumors at three, five and six o’clock, you can’t just do a lumpectomy,” she says. “But, because it was so early, they were able to do skin-sparing and nipple-sparing. And there was no need to do radiation or chemotherapy.”

Now, Bender does everything she can to reduce her risk of another fight with cancer, such as paying more attention to the food she eats. “But the biggest thing that I’m doing is not to be as stressed,” says Bender “I’ve always been a workaholic, so I’ve really made more time to appreciate my world and my friends and I exercise and mediate regularly.”

Bender is also helping to keep others cancer-free. She encourages women with dense breasts or family histories of breast cancer to talk to their doctors and to stay informed about the latest techniques and screening guidelines.

Bender understands that cancer prevention research and clinical trials are constantly helping to improve medicine. So it is important not only to take charge, but also to be informed about the benefits and limitations of medical techniques.