Trout to Angelfish: Mammo-time!

A pause in the fun to note that it’s Breast Cancer Awareness month. I don’t have breast cancer in my family - we favor the sudden heart attack and the quick Fade to Black - but where we’re all living longer the chances are great that we’ll all get some kind of cancer, especially after all those years of cooking on Teflon and dancing in the mists of DDT whenever the Bug Man came to spray the neighborhood. (You’d have to be over 45 to remember that guy!)My column this week is about the despised mammogram. Just picture taking a nice fat trout and turning into an angelfish even for a quick 30 seconds– yeowch!) I'll put it in its usual This Week's Column spot above but will copy it below here too just because  it’s  important.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Last year when I had a mammogram I wrote about it in post called “It’s Cryin’ Time Again, You’re Gonna Squeeze Me,”  echoing the old Ray Charles song. “I have to warn you, I’m a fainter,” I told the imaging professional administering the exam as she screwed together the two icy plates of her high-tech vise.The truth is I mostly fainted in my early years, like in church when I could often be found gurgling in the pew, half caught under the kneeler. Or like that time a creaky old doctor offered to remove two tiny warts for me, causing me to still have twin scars of the exact kind you’d get if someone stabbed two glowing cigarettes into your flesh.The mammographer just smiled. “People only faint if they haven’t had breakfast. And nobody faints after 11 in the morning.” “OK” I said as we stood there, she fully clothed, I as naked from the waist up as the Venus De Milo. It was well past 11. It was, in fact, 5:30 at night.Then she asked if I did regular self-exams, causing me to blurt out the terrible truth. “Oh sure.  That is, sometimes. Well, no, not really.”“Nobody does them,” she said, all the geniality in her voice suddenly gone.She didn’t chastise me the way they do at the dentist’s when they ask about flossing and you lie and say you do it all the time. She didn’t give me a lecture. She didn’t so much as sigh. If I wanted to get sick it was fine with her, is what she was saying in all but words.“I’ve been doing this since 7:30 this morning.” And now here it was almost 6. “I’m dead on my feet:”“It’s been a long day for you,” I said sympathetically, hoping for the return of her former warmth.But “Yep,” was all she said back. Just one little tight-lipped “yep,” and in the ensuing silence I felt the full weight of her frustration with a group of people who leave themselves open to all kinds of bad possibilities just because they‘re too “busy,” or too distracted, or too limited in their vision to slide their hands around on their own bare skin now and then.The memory of this visit lives vividly in my mind and now here we are again in the month dedicated to breast cancer awareness.We women over 40 should get mammograms if our doctors recommend that we do. But even if it’s true that a lump is hard to detect with self-examination we should also show some sense and check ourselves out, in the shower, say, when the skin is soapy and we can really feel the tissue underneath.