Standing In a Corner and Screaming

I went in for my biannual, supposed to be annual, mammogram a week and a half ago. I have such a hard time believing that having your breasts compressed as far as you can stand it, (and sometimes further), and then blasted with radiation, is good for them.

So far, so bad. This past week I got a call saying they were unable to see as much as they wanted to in my left breast, and therefore wanted to take ANOTHER x-ray. It left me breathless with fear and trembling, or as my lovely boyfriend likes to say "up in the trees". I needed to be talked down after my atavistic scramble for safety into the panic tree. How do you wrap your brain around something like that? Slowly, one step at a time.

I made the follow up appointment, they scheduled me for two weeks from now. Super! So I could sit up here, chittering madly to myself, for two weeks? I don't think so. I called back and told them this was unacceptable, please to schedule as soon as possible, anything they could do to help would be muchly appreciated. I got in on a cancellation the next day.

This time they squooshed even harder than before, they went all medieval on my poor breast, and I burst into tears. Torture? I would crack like a freshly laid egg. Then I sat in the little changing cubicle, waiting for the results, trying to stay in the "happy place" I had been constucting for myself out of snatches of songs and memories of chocolate for the past couple of days. Half an hour later the tech came back and told me the radiologist said I was "good for now", but they felt it was prudent for me to come back in six months for more medieval procedures. Good for now?

I felt no relief. Instead I felt exhausted and nauseated, like someone had just pushed me out of the way of a speeding bus. I went back to work, even though I just wanted to go home and curl up in a little ball. I told a friend there, whose wife had gone through breast cancer several years before, that I could not begin to imagine what it must have been like for them. His response was "like being in a car rollover , in slow motion, for five years".
Oh god.

It was a shock to realize that despite my best efforts at spin control there had been a part of me standing in a corner, screaming in terror, for several days . Five years?!?

I thought about my breasts, those most innocent parts of myself. They only have one function in all of our lives, to love and be loved. Nothing else. I haven't had children, and still that is their function, to make me lovely, to love and be loved by my lover. When all that furor occurred after Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" I could not understand. It's just a breast!!! Since when did breasts threaten civilization, shoot people, crash cars, sell drugs? I'm not talking about our reaction or misuse of them, I'm talking about breasts themselves. What is their function? Love. That is all. And love in the purest, most innocent sense. Love as nourishment, and nourishment as love.

My father, the retired surgeon, asked me if I thought perhaps they might have injured my breast on the first go round. "Was the pain any worse or more particular on the left side?" he asked. I could only answer that the pain was bad on both sides, and as such couldn't tell. Of course they injured my breasts! The sign in the mammography room said:"We compress because we care". No comment.

I understand that mammograms are the best way for early detection of breast cancer. I cannot fault the research findings which are obvious, but I cannot ignore the punishment this method puts my breasts through, the kindest, softest, most innocent parts of me. I repeat, this cannot be good for me.