Cancer and dense breast tissue

(WTNH) -- She was faithful about a mammogram every year and yet she was diagnosed with stage three late stage breast cancer in 2004. It turned out that Nancy Cappello had dense breast tissue, something she was never told.

Cappello has now set out to save lives after living this nightmare so that all women get access to better imaging by law.

"Not only was I outrage about the information I was finding but I also was scare I mean I had breast cancer, I had late stage cancer and I found out all this information that's been around for a decade at the time, now we're talking two decades and no one bothered to tell me and by the way lady, just so you know your mammogram, you know about 50-50 shot of having your cancer found or missed and so I was telling my husband Joe about what I uncovered and I actually went back to my doctors and this is what made me be the advocate of change. I said to two of my doctors look at all that I have found. I had all the copies of all the research that I uncovered. I said look what I found. Do you know that dense breast tissue is very common and there are so many women just like me whose cancers are being missed and are found at a later stage, shouldn't you be telling women this, and the answer I got was not the standard protocol, that we don't do that."

Well they're doing it now in Connecticut and in four other states. And now Cappello has legislation on the books in the U.S. House of Representatives. The hope is soon there will be a federal law to force doctors to tell women about dense breast tissue and to get them better imaging so they can find their cancers.

For more information to help Cappello in her quest go to AreYouDense.org .