Jun
21
For my mammogram appointment yesterday I started things off strong by parking in the wrong building. Not a super big deal except I am less familiar with this parking garage and thus spent some time wandering a backrooms-esque structure 1) when I arrived while looking for the entrance, and 2) when I left, having misplaced my car’s location entirely.
When I got to the imaging center I was checked in by a very young man who was friendly but a little awkward/nervous-seeming and when he walked me in I briefly thought that it would be him doing the scanning and we would surely both perish of embarrassment. But no, I just had to wait in an interior area for a minute before a female tech came and got me.
I could swear the last time I had one there was a little curtain for changing and I wore some sort of open gown situation on my upper half, but this time there was a chair to put my stuff on and that was it! Just strip to the waist and stand by the machine. That certainly felt vulnerable but it did expedite the process because we got down to business right away.
If you haven’t had a mammogram the idea is to get your breast tissue allllll the way onto this flat surface and then a clear lid of sorts gets hand-cranked down until your boob takes on a shape you have never seen it in before. Think flapjack. Meanwhile you get micro-adjusted by the technician until your body is in the right position where it kind of feels like you’re in a weirdly intimate slow-dance with this giant machine and then you have to hold your breath briefly and it does its thing and then you do the other breast, and then the machine tilts carnival-ride-style into a new angle and you do it all over again.
The tech was efficient and easy to chat with and she said it was much more difficult when there’s not much to grab onto, and that her team had agreed that the right tool for the job would be a spatula, but “you know…a medical type of spatula. People feel weird enough without someone using a kitchen tool.”
Now I personally think it would be funny/delightful if imaging centers had a bunch of OXO Good Grips spatulas that were perhaps staff-decorated with festive ribbons and stickers and those were set aside for the A-cup crowd, but sadly I was not brought in as a medical device consultant. (Which is too bad because surely it is beyond past time for fresh ideas regarding cold metal speculums.)
The upside of having this appointment on a sunny Saturday afternoon was that very few people were around, which lent a peaceful feeling to the overall hospital environment and thankfully no one to observe me bumbling confusedly back and forth like Pulp Fiction John Travolta trying to find my goddamned car afterwards.
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I was glad to read this while waiting for a Pap smear (yippee!). I always laugh at my yearly appointments when thinking of one of your years-ago posts…”Warm Hands, Cold Bum” I think it was called? I don’t know how you manage to make these situations better, but you never fail. Ribboned spatulas, please!
Ha ha. I could picture your description of it! So awkward! The tech never remembers to tell me when she’s going to start the imaging and will abruptly tell me to hold my breath. Inevitably its just as I exhaled and I’m desperate for air after holding my breath. Ah well, it’s not as bad as other tests and its quick!
Do you ever think mammogram technology is at the floppy disk stage of development and there’s got to be an easier, kinder way to do this, and the reason is women are still lower priority in medicine? Lawd…