My first mammogram

A summary for the squeamish: It all turns out fine. Having a mammogram is not nearly as terrifying or uncomfortable as I had been encouraged to believe. Considerably less so than, say, dental X-rays.

I was not really all that apprehensive about having a mammogram; I knew that those stupid e-mails circulating every few months about how to prepare for your mammogram were ridiculously exaggerated (it's nothing like putting your breast into a cold waffle iron, for example, or lying down on the garage floor and having someone back over it with a car. Not that I've done these things, but I'm sure they're worse than the very minor discomfort of a mammogram). I was pretty sure I didn't have any major risk factors for breast cancer, and I did have a few reservations about how good a screening tool mammography is. There are a lot of false negatives (screening mammography misses about 20% of cancers), and quite a few false positives (e.g. things that look like a tumor on the mammogram but turn out to be nothing), especially in younger women, which in this setting I am.

Plus, I know that many studies of breast cancer (and this is changing as treatment options improve) count five-year post-treatment survival rates as success. It seems to me that earlier detection simply increases the amount of time you spend knowing you have cancer and dealing with it. My reasoning is a little flawed; I asked a few cancer researchers I know, and it does appear to be the case that early detection does improve the odds of successful treatment. I also learned that I do have a few pretty important risk factors: no family history of breast cancer, true, but I have never had any babies (I knew there was something I was forgetting to do), I started menstruating very early, I drink alcohol, I've used birth control pills. Damn. Big deal if I like tofu and exercise plenty.

By the time I actually made the appointment I was feeling like I had these ticking time bombs tucked into my shiny black bra.

I'm here to tell you that the screening mammogram (the kind they recommend either every year or every other year for women starting at age 40), is really not that unpleasant, or at least it wasn't for me. Sure, it's a little unnerving to take your shirt off and rest your tits on this little plastic shelf while this blandly impersonal but competent and nice technician adjusts them with her latex-gloved hands and has you lean this way and that to get the right angle and then lowers another plastic shelf to gently clamp it in place while she goes and snaps a picture & releases the clamp thingy right away. I think there were four separate poses in all.

Truly, it did not hurt a bit, and it was not even a little scary. Full disclosure: I have worked in health care/academic medicine for an awful lot of my so-called career, so I'm not put off by medical gear or clinic settings. Also, I have kind of big tits, and I've heard that the process is a little more difficult & uncomfortable for flatter-chested types.

It was all over in less than ten minutes and I was getting dressed, la la la, and went away & forgot all about it. The scary part came the following week, when I was exhausted and finally getting around to opening several days' worth of mail:

"Your recent mammography examination showed a finding that requires additional imaging studies for a complete evaluation. Most such findings are benign (not cancer). Please call blah blah blah ... "

Well, shit. It was too late to call that day, so I called first thing the next morning & made an appointment for the following Monday.

So then I got to work and there was this furious-sounding message on my voicemail from Nancy or someone in the Cancer Screening Center. Just her name, department, phone extension, and a request to please call her ASAP. I called, asked for Nancy, and Miss Snippity-Snip at the other end says that there are three people named Nancy & which did I need to speak to? I said I was returning a call & I didn't know the last name. She demanded to know what the call was regarding and I had to confess that Nancy hadn't said what it was about and was about to say, "maybe my mammogram appointment?" or "never mind, she can call me back if it's important," when I was listening to hold music all of a sudden. I couldn't really tell for sure, but it seemed like she'd hit the hold button a little too hard.

I had a few minutes of terror listening to "Minuet in G" thinking, "my god, is this really how they treat patients over there?"

Well, Nancy came on the line and started bitching right away about That Document, the one that kept me at work until like 4:23 am last week. Her first concern seemed to be that the thing on the left was blue, not gold like it used to be. And "you know that place where you put your mouse and it popped up where you want to go? It used to have on that one spot there were like a bunch of choices: A-F, G-K, L-Q & so on, but now it just says A-Z."

"Yeah?" I said helpfully, not understanding the problem. It seemed that she was looking for something that started with an H, and was having trouble locating H between A and Z. I swear I'm not making this up. I said, "What happens when you click on that, the A-Z thing?" I was afraid maybe the link was broken or something embarrassing.

She said, "Yeah, but then I have to scroll down to get to H. Where's the list of names that light up?"

I didn't want to try to explain that it had been changed because the old one didn't print out correctly for too many people, or they didn't like that it was sideways on the page or something, and they'd asked me to do it over this way.

So I asked her if she knew how to use the search function in her browser. It's described in detail at least ten times before you ever get to the page she was bitching about. But I'm used to this sort of thing. I had to repeat "control-F-enter" several times while she wrote it down.

"And then you just type in the word you're looking for?" she asks. "Can you do that on all the pages?"

"Well, yeah, you can do that on any web page or in pretty much any document in Word or Adobe or whatever. It works great. Keep in mind though that if the word is in there more than once, it'll go to the first appearance of the word, so you might have to hit the enter key more than once."

"The enter key?" she says.

"Or you could just print yourself a copy of the whole thing," I said. "Control-P."

Anyway, nothing like a little comic relief to take my mind off the tick ... tick ... tick noise from under my sweater. I mean, I know that most such findings are benign. I know that sometimes your bigger breasts are a little harder to get clear images of in the screening mammogram & they probably just wanted better pictures of my tits. But still. For once I could hardly wait for it to be Monday. The follow-up mammogram was a little more intense, but then the radiologist came in and said "You're fine! Go get dressed & get outta here."

The next day was my birthday. I went and bought myself five new bras, all very pretty, and I can't hear any more ticking.