Breasted

A few years ago at my annual appointment with my ob/gyn nurse practitioner, she announced that it was time for my baseline mammogram. I argued the point that I was only 37, way early for that, and she argued right back. Thus began my odyssey with The Breast Department. 

When you get to the mammography department, they give you a bunch of papers to fill out. They need to know your family history of breast cancer because they have to figure out your statistics and make a Punnett Square and things like that, and there was a list of female relatives to check off. 

I am fortunate that I don't have a history of breast cancer in my family, on either side. Among the women. I had to take the form back to the desk and ask the woman what to do if I needed to check someone who wasn't there. Apparently she'd never been asked that question before, because she told me that just wasn't possible. 

But it is possible. My grandmother's brother, my great-uncle Aldine, had breast cancer twice, and had two mastectomies. He did not die of breast cancer, but approximately 458 men will die of breast cancer in 2009 (a fact I gleaned from Nip/Tuck, which I don't usually watch). 

I bring up men and their breasts because the man on Nip/Tuck, whatever his name is, who has breast cancer, is having a very different experience with his lump than I had with mine. 

The day I had my first mammogram, the technician developed the film and came back and told me she'd have to do it again because it was cloudy. She re-took it immediately, then took me into a room with a lightbox and showed me what she thought the specialist would want her to zero in on so he could take a closer look at it. I asked where the specialist was located, and she said that person was right in that very building. I wanted her to zero in right then and take the film, have that part done, be one step closer to just knowing. She told me she couldn't. 

On Nip/Tuck, the man is actually just at the doctor's office with his friend and mentions he has a lump and his friend, also a doctor, tells him to just get the mammogram right then. And he does, right then and there. The oncologist says it looks bad and he can do a biopsy in a week. The guy says he can't wait, he won't wait, dammit, needs to know now, all manlylike, and the doctor says fine, he can do a needle biopsy on the spot and find out if it's malignant. 

My experience was not like that. And I know I'm not a television character. But I cannot help but think that were I a doctor, and a man doctor, especially, things would have been different, faster, easier, more efficient. 

To allay your curiosity, I did not have cancer. I still have all the parts I came here with, aside from eight teeth I had removed for braces. 

I waited eleven baited days for my next mammogram, at which time the radiologist told me that an ultrasound would be required, and that would be scheduled for one week hence. I flung a fit and had the ultrasound in two days instead, but at such times, even two days seems like a lifetime.

Before, when I was innocent, what I thought would happen if you had a suspicious lump was that everything would move so fast you wouldn't know what hit you – I'd be on a table and a surgeon would find the offending tissue, take it out, sew me up, fill me with poison and radiation and send me home with a stack of books and a sackful of things to cover my head until my hair grew back, lush and steely gray. 

When I returned in two days for my ultrasound, I was sent to a new level of waiting room, a room less bright, a room where pink cloth shirts are issued instead of white paper vests, and where the magazines are plentiful. I waited and waited and waited. I waited until I saw janitors emptying the wastepaper baskets. Finally I got up and walked down the hall and found someone who told me she was just turning everything off.  She'd forgotten I was there. I burst into tears; she told me she'd just dress the table and let the oncologist know I was there. 

That was the only time during those several weeks that I cried.

After the ultrasound was over, the oncologist, a young guy, took me into his office and said that his gut instinct was that it was nothing, just a clump of cysts, like champagne grapes, sort of. I think I surprised him with my very blunt "How's your gut's record with shit like this?" 

Nonetheless, he scheduled me for a stereotactic biopsy, one in which I would be wide awake, completely draped except for my breast, one that would definitively determine whether or not I had a malignant tumor in my breast.  

Everyone around me freaked out. I did not freak out. I figured that this was not a test I could study for, that all I could do was show up on time. Because I am a researcher by nature, I studied up on breast cancer and biopsies and the things they draw out of breasts and what the fluid would look like coming up the tube were it healthy or malignant. By the day of the procedure, were I ambidextrous, I probably could have performed it myself. 

The day I went for my biopsy, I went to yet another level of waiting room - one where the lighting is incandescant lamps on tables near soft, roomy arm chairs. There are boxes of Kleenex everywhere. Magazines are sparse. There are pads of paper and pens everywhere. And teabags and cups and a hot water machine. And bottles of cold water. Nobody in that quiet room ever gets forgotten. The shirts are fuller in the front, and longer, more modest. The women in that room mostly just sit in their chairs, their legs crossed at the knees, their arms crossed over their chests, one hand over their mouths. 

I will spare you the gory details, but I will tell you that having a needle the diameter of a drinking straw pushed into your breast requires about as much pressure as pushing a piano across the floor. And while the area is numb, you can still feel the pushing. Because I read a lot, I had labeled my left breast "Not this breast" with a black Sharpie. The surgeon noticed and asked who had done that - she laughed when I said I was just making sure things went according to plan.

The nurse asked if I wanted an eye mask. I declined; I wanted to watch it all, to see that it went the way it should, to see the color of the fluid removed so I'd know without having to wait for the lab. As the machinery started, I waited for the fluid to rise from my breast and into the beaker. I was relieved to see that it was clearish pink, not green or like chocolate milk. I knew right then that all was well. 

I was somewhat confounded that after it was over, they wanted to yet again squeeze my breasts between the cold steel plates of the mammogram machine. They actually wanted to do it twice, just to make sure they got clear pictures, but I refused more than one, on the basis that if they couldn't figure out what they needed to know from the previous eight I'd had in the past 20 days, then they were all idiots. By then, I was raising hell and yelling for the dressings nurse, declaring that I was going home and nobody else was touching it. 

During the space of that 21 days, I had nine mammograms, three ultrasounds, one biopsy, and one emergency redressing of the wound site. 17 different people touched my breasts. I know because I kept count. 

As I mentioned before, the only time I cried or freaked out was the day the ultrasound technician forgot me. The next year, when I went for my mammogram, I was filling out the intake papers and got to the check-off section that asked if I'd ever had cancer or had a suspicious lump. And I just...lost it. I started crying and I could not stop. For the first time in my life, I was pigeonholed into a category that I will always belong in: I am a woman who had a suspicious lump.

I am a woman who has a metal marker in her breast so that specialists can always find that sneaky spot where it might come back. Now I get moved to the front of the line. I am sent to the special room with the nice gowns. I sit there with those women and I think to myself "There but for the grace of God..." but it's always in the back of mind that it could be me, it might be me one day. 

I always wanted to be special, but not this way. I wanted to be special in that way that I get to go to the Inauguration and be escorted in a special car to a special seat, where I won't be bothered by not-so-special crowds kicking the back of my chair and spilling beer on me. 

I do, however, want to be special like that man doctor on Nip/Tuck.