Titties Like a Clear Blue Sky: Welcome to Mammography

Happy Inaugural Pancake Day, Ya’ll

I thought about mammograms about as often as I thought about my personal tax rate or the last time an Idaho senator won a presidential primary. (Like, never.) I just sort of skated through life worried about other scary medical things like brain aneurysms and exploded spleens and bullshit like instant teeth that decay if I even look at a candy bar. But never mammograms and breast health. 

My mom mentioned hating them so much that she never went back a couple of years ago. I figure, like me, she had enough on her medical plate and having no medical or family history of breast cancer, it was never something she talked about.

That’s where I’m going with this whole essay. The things we never talk about but, goddamit, we should.

I turn 44 this summer and at the back of my mind, I knew I needed to get one, even just to establish a sort of baseline for the future. Actually, I’m pretty sure that winter I was facing 40, my primary care doctor ordered me one and I’ve spent the last three years successfully dodging the scheduler’s phone calls because I am the goddamn best at dodging your phone call if I’m not about what you’re trying to say to me. I go through some seriously questionable phases where I don’t want to hear sensible, life-changing advice from medical professionals and I squarely blame it on the undiagnosed PTSD I tell myself I have after brain surgery and nearly dying…from a fucking spleen eruption.

I’ll fast forward to about a month ago when I decided that at 43 and 4/9ths, it was time to be an adult and do all that adulty shit we’re supposed to do. The short list includes boring things like making a will, buying life insurance, organizing some garden tools in your side yard and probably even buying mulch. But also scheduling those weird old people appointments that come when you cross that invisible threshold from passively to actively decomposing and falling apart with the onslaught of time.

I’m not even mad about aging, though. I’m really not.

After losing my mom last summer, the privilege of another year is never lost on me.

So instead of getting black mulch and throwing out my middle-aged back like all the rest of the good people of the world, I sit down on a Monday morning and make a series of increasingly humiliating appointments that will try my patience and modesty to my very core. They include a mammogram (my first), a skin cancer screening (another first), a series of godawful dental appointments (not a first, but put off for so long they might as well be) a vision screening, a hearing check and a massage (because, holy shit, I deserve one after a month like that).

Why is this a big secret?

So after feeling adulty and accomplished, I promptly forget everything until the morning of my mammogram and suddenly I’m sitting inside my car in a hospital parking lot wondering what in the FUCK is about to happen. It occurs to me that I’ve heard mammogram experiences from my peers exactly zero times in my life and suddenly I’m pissed off like these women I love are holding out on the holy grail of information from me. Or I’m pissed because I’m the oldest person I know, apparently, and nobody has gotten one yet.

Does it hurt? Is it embarrassing? Are there markers to stand on when I get in there? Will there be snacks? Do I have to make small talk? What the hell is about to happen and why the fuck aren’t we talking about this?

To begin with, it’s an incredibly lonely experience. The hallway I walked down was straight out of some horror scene and I swear the damn thing just kept stretching longer and longer in all of its mauve glory and I was just going to keep walking to infinity and beyond. 

The door was also mauve. Like, where did they find this much boring ass mauve paint? Was it on clearance? It wasn’t an intentional choice, was it? Dear god, please tell me hospital administrators didn’t have a whole ass meeting and decide that THIS was the best color to set intimidated and anxious women’s minds at ease. True story: it doesn’t.

A wonderful woman named Sophia was waiting on the other side of the door for me and this is where the experience takes a turn for the better. She’s the mammographer, she’s a traveling nurse from Orlando, and she’s basically a badass who knows it’s my very first boobie rodeo and she makes it all that much better.

The truth of a mammogram, from my experience only, is that you just don’t know what to do with the parts of your body that aren’t being compressed to a one-inch thickness. At one point in the twenty-two minute encounter (literally all it took was 22 minutes before I was in my car headed for pancakes),  I found my rib cage and part of my sternum on the plastic cassette (on purpose, of course…I already mentioned Sophia was a badass at what she did) and I had no goddamn idea where my hands were supposed to go and whether or not moving my foot a few inches forward would ruin the whole damn thing because I was one inhale away from losing my balance.

I think the next time the big medical tech companies make the 3-D mammogram machines, they really ought to stencil a few handprints here and there or maybe even put some cute straps for us to hang on to so we can be both stable and not awkward. As it currently stands, you can only be one. I went for stable, and lucky for me, my images were perfectly fine the first time around.

Sophia called me back to look at my squished titty pic (I was way more interested than I thought I’d be) and she uttered a sentence to me that was both completely nonsensical and the best thing I’ve ever heard.

Face straight, Sophia points at the screen and says “your breasts are fatty. Like a cloudless blue sky day in the image.”

I had to blink a few times while my brain caught up. Thankfully it did and once I got over the knee-jerk reaction of a body part of mine and the word “fatty” living in the same sentence together, I sort of preened a little with my chubby boob sitting there on the screen like a blue clear sky. Fuck yeah.

So long, Sophia…

We talked a moment about fatty versus dense breast tissue and by the time I was putting my shirt back on with a lot less embarrassment and awkwardness than when I was taking it off, the truth that this entire encounter was about to be over sort of hit me and I wanted to delay saying goodbye to my new bestie Sophia, a woman who’d offered so much wisdom and comfort but who had also had her hands all over my boobs and pulled them straight across an imaging deck like some rolled out play dough pancake.

Like, how do we exist in such a duality? And how was I going to live without my new best friend, who I knew loved the food in Chester where she was living on a 6-month contract and hated the mud season she’d just lived through. Who hailed from Florida but promised to renew contracts to Vermont as long as they’d have her.

I wanted to take Sophia to lunch. Or pancakes Or coffee. Anything to avoid the absolute inevitability that I was going to leave the suite and never see this ray of sunshine again. Was this really it? Such a close, personal encounter and then…nothing? Strangers to pass like ships in the fluorescent-watted night. It seemed ludicrous to me after she’d just had her hands all over the merchandise for a good twenty minutes.

One tearful goodbye later (I’m kidding), I’m in my car eating victory pancakes and thinking about how little I knew about what to expect and how stupid that is. We made it this far and with it, comes a bunch of dumb, weird shit that nobody talks about and HOLY SHIT why aren’t we talking about this stuff? How many of us put things off because it’s weird and scary and it turns out, that yes, it might be weird and scary but there’s also a chance that it’s weird and scary AND there’s a badass nurse named Sophia there and suddenly you’ll have a funny story to tell about it and suddenly it’s a little less weird and scary.

Maybe?

Also, Sophia, if you read this…let’s do lunch. My treat.