If You Don't Know What This Is, Maybe You're Overdue

This is progress?  Florally-decorated tit-covers, featured at my latest mammogram.  Nothing else had changed--clipboard with form to fill out, waiting room, thumbed-over magazines, women talking.

But flowers, shmowers, cloth gowns in tastefully muted colors--it still hurts when the machine smashes a breast between the X-ray plates.  There's less clanking connected with its action than twenty years ago.  I've considered making a performance piece to incorporate those sounds, echoes for my feelings on the mechanical remoteness of the procedure. 

But, it's less painful than my breast biopsy a few years ago.  I'd not been told what it would be like, so impersonal, never saw the doctor who did it--just his back as he walked out the door.  For this mammogram, the technician was a gentle, soft-spoken woman.   All pales beside the reality of breast cancer.  That's why I submit, you submit--again and again.  And the flowered tit-covers actually were a welcome distraction. 

Comments

[sfk]

what are those FOR? modesty?! what a joke... there we are with everything hanging out and they think nipple bandaids will make a difference? i know they don't lessen the uh, discomfort. haha.

[Maya's Granny]

A few years ago I went for my annual. My physician is a delightful young woman, about six years younger than my youngest child. I did those washable tatoo things -- a wreathe of flowers around each nipple. She loved it, told me I'm her role model.

[writerdd]

I actually find dental x-rays to be more of a discomfort than a mammogram.

I never got flower tit bandaids though! :-) What are people embarassed that they have nipples or something? Or are these to indicate the marks on your skin so the technician knows not to worry about them?

[Susan aka SAZ]

This is different but cute. Last time I had mine they asked if I wanted the extra pad which they give you for a $5 donation to a breast cancer group. Thought it was an excellent idea - both the pad and the donation but I didn't get this flowered version!

[Claude]

Had never heard of those. I hate dentists, but mammograms are almost the worst thing. A good thing that they don't happen more than once a year. I feel like I am being abused. My operated breast hurts more than the other, but the process is painful. My doctor is wonderful, but the technicians who actually do the mammogram seem to do this mechanically and I feel like my breasts are just pieces of meat :(
Never seen any of these florally-decorated tit-covers over here in France though

[audrey]

Maybe instead of breast pads they should figure out how to warm up the metal on the machine. This seems like an attempt to put a little humor into a rather mechanical process.
But consider us lucky - when you find the cancer early, it's curable and treatable. In some places in the world (Cuba, for instance) they can't afford the film so women of a certain age only get mammograms every several years.