Mammograms Suck!

Originally written: April, 2008 (Note: THE INTENT OF THIS PIECE IS HUMOR. If you don't take it that way, please don't e-mail me and lecture me on why it's not funny or what the big deal is with getting a mammogram. It's funny. It celebrates our camaraderie as women. Get a sense of humor and leave me the hell alone.)

Recently, I had to have what all women my age should have done on a yearly basis, a mammogram. Now, the title of this entry states that mammograms suck, but that's actually inaccurate. Mammograms are wonderful, life saving things. As stated previously, they are an absolutely essential part of all women's healthcare. Having had friends and family members who have had experience dealing with breast cancer, I feel that I cannot emphasize enough how important these routine exams are.

However, I also feel like I cannot emphasize enough how much the experience of enduring a mammogram sucks...particularly one administered by a surly technician who's obviously in a hurry to go to lunch. My recent experience proceeded routinely. I was led into a large waiting room, was handed a nearly transparent hospital gown, and was told to disrobe from the waist up in the coat closet sized dressing room. I was then to put the nearly transparent gown on and parade my happy butt through the subarctic temperature of the waiting room and seat it in one of the chairs to await my turn on the stretch-o-matic joyride. I've noticed that there's a certain body posture that women adopt while awaiting this particular fun filled activity. We were all sitting with our arms crossed in front of us, a posture which is the direct result of a combination of a lack of foundation garments and the aforementioned subarctic temperature of the waiting room.

Thankfully, my name was called after a brief wait so that I didn't have a chance to get bored with the dogeared, mostly mutiliated copy of Ladies Home Journal from May, 1983, in which George Michael talked about his half of the duo Wham! I entered the room of doom behind my personal surly mammographer and approached a piece of equipment that the Marquis de Sade would have been pleased to call his own. My mammographer, let's just call her Toots, without so much as a by your leave, demanded that I drop the semitransparent robe and began to womanhandle my delicates into the mammography instrument. She gripped my tissue tightly with both hands, dragged me by the boob over to the instrument, and with her foot, pressed the mechanized pedal which was apparently set to the "flat as a crepe" setting. There was no hand operated fine adjustment of the smushing device, we went directly from nice and comfy to DAMN!

So, I'm standing there, half naked, with an impressively large piece of technological wizardry painfully attached to my chest and Toots then says to me, "Don't move." Okay, I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but exactly where would I move to? You have me by the mammary, Toots. I am certainly not planning on going anywhere in the immediate future. I mean, as with my American Express card, I don't leave home without my tits.

Maybe it was the grimace on my face that irritated her, maybe it was the tears in my eyes, but she then proceeded to pull the machine AWAY from me. "Ummmm...hello? I'm still attached by the aforementioned chi chi, Toots. Can we please refrain from dragging me around the room by it?" I remember wondering about exactly what sort of education one would need to become a mammographer. How many hours of torture, mayhem and despair would constitute a well rounded academic experience? And, do you have required laboratory time or just the lectures? Where do you find volunteers for the lab torture? Please do not tell me that you practice on each other because that would indicate to me that there's no lower limit of intelligence required to pursue this specific line of study.

And, this was the first visit. Fast forward to two weeks later when I had the pleasure of meeting Toots II.

Toots II greeted me with a smile and a kind word...before she proceeded to reduce me to a quivering, sniffling, lightheaded mass of protoplasm. She started our visit by slapping the films shot by our friendly photographer, Toots I, onto the light board and pointing out the ominously circled spots, one on each breast, which the radiologist wanted to examine more closely.

After sufficiently scaring the snot out of me, Toots II determined that she must apply some pasties to my unmentionables, I guess to indicate to the radiologist exactly which portion of the tissue was the pointy part. I was just about to ask her if she thought she had brought enough one dollar bills to encourage me to dance, when she grabbed me by the hoochies and proceeded to pull the same stunts with a greater intensity and more sense of purpose than Toots I.

This time, I truly did feel at one point that I was going to faint. I got that lightheaded feeling, where little spots of black began encroaching from the outer fields of my vision in. I got the flop sweaty feeling and the nausea, upchucking feeling. The only thing that saved me from completely passing out was the mental image of myself, lying there, half naked in my little gray gymshorts and tennis shoes, with my bright white, cellulite ridden thighs creating enough glare to blind the nurses rushing in to revive me. If you've never had that particularly sobering mental image of yourself, trust me, it's enough to disturb your slumber for a decade.

The upshot of these two lovely experiences is that further tests need to be done. I'm not particularly worried because fibrocystic breast disease is very common in the female members of my family. I am, however, quite concerned as to how I'm going to convince my family doctor to give me a prescription for valium for my next photo session. I guess I'll tell her to either give me the pills or I'm showing up drunk.

After all, it's quite impolite to ask a woman to strip and bare her bosoms and make her do it sober.