This woman's simple "trick" to finding her breast cancer lump early has gone viral.

Hayley Browning is young and in love, living what looks like an incredible life. However three short weeks ago the woman from Essex in the UK discovered she has breast cancer.

Sadly such diagnoses are not all that uncommon, but the way she detected the breast cancer is . And Hayley wants all women to learn from her experience.

She says the only reason she detected her breast cancer was because she performed a self-exam while lying down.

“I’m hoping to share a little trick of mine with as many people as possible, which could potentially help save someone’s life,” she wrote. “Three weeks ago, I was diagnosed with Breast Cancer. I could only feel the lump whilst lying down and it completely disappeared standing up. Most websites tell you to check for lumps in the shower but if I had followed this advice, the lump may have grown too large to be treatable.”

“Not even the surgeon could feel my lump when I was standing up.”

Her post has been shared over 65,000 times and received almost 10,000 comments. Hayley says her Facebook post is “a call out to all women to check for lumps lying down, as well as standing up.”

Hayley’s advice is so important because the earlier any form of cancer is found, the higher the survival rate.

Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer to cause death in woman in Australia, after lung cancer, according to Cancer Council Australia. If the cancer is found early and limited to the breast, 96 per cent of patients will still be with us five years after diagnosis.

It’s once that cancer has spread that a patient’s chance of survival starts to drop.

Hayley is at the beginning of a long and difficult journey but says she wants as many people as possible to read her message. “As I think about my long journey ahead and the chemotherapy I will undertake, I want to reach as many people with this message and help find more,” she wrote.

Others say they detected their breast cancer in a similar way, with Helen Hinsull writing that her cancer presented as “thickened tissue” that didn’t show up on a mammogram. She wrote, “I found my lump lying in bed.”

Elizabeth Macneill had a similar experience except with more advanced breast cancer, also detected while lying down.

She posted in the Comments section of Hayley’s initial post, “My Lump was the same & if i hadn’t insisted they check it out properly i may not be here now, by the time i was sent for Surgery it had grown to a Grade 3 Tumor that was still only detectable while Lying down.”

So when you next perform a self-check, consider incorporating this trick.

To find out more information about breast cancer, visit the Cancer Council website.

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