The Mammogram

I had to wait for the doctor to give me an ultrasound afterwards. The wait felt like a long time, and while lying there in the dimly lit room, I alternated feeling worried and bored and on the verge of a panic attack and peckish and sleepy, and after crying a little, for having to wait so long, for being there alone, for fearing the results that, while horizontal on the examination table, felt, for the first time, both looming right in front of me, and inevitable, and apocalyptic, I started wondering if I could shield the fluorescent light from my field of vision with one or both of my Caterpillar boots, and I was just giving it a try, with both my feet up, in a fine right angle, with one eye closed and bare-breasted, when he finally arrived.

It all started about six or seven months ago, when I started experiencing a strange pressure, almost like a hurt, on my left side, around the breast area. The pain would be intermittent, like it still is, and would only last for a few seconds. At first I brushed it off, thinking, since I am a leftie, and have a tendency to go on a rampage, have tantrums, throw fits, exaggerate, nervously panic, or regress into the dark abyss of a hypochondriac when it was three in the morning and I couldn’t sleep, that it must be one of those reasons why my breast was bugging me.

My second theory had to do with the fact that since I do most of the heavy lifting with my left hand, including writing by hand in my journal – heavy lifting if there ever was any!, that I must have sprained something, that it was a muscle spasm, since my self-examinations after period were going nowhere. In fact I think I was making things worse with my constant groping and prodding and looking at myself in the mirror in a suspecting way, going hmm.

When putting on a bra started to hurt, I booked an appointment with a doctor. This was October, I believe. Now, the two doctors that tended to me at my worst, when I was in the eye of the insomnia and/or depression hurricane, have both retired and opened a salad bar. While kidding about the salad bar, and the allusion that their retirement had anything to do with me, the fact of the matter is that there was no one at Medical who had any idea who I was, where I was coming from, or what had been going on in my life for the past four years, except the transcripts of course, which must read like a novel, since every time I have a doctor’s appointment lately, the doctor is always late and I can only think that it is the lengthy reading of my chart that makes them so late so often.

I have gone to the doctor for numerous reasons since my two trusted people left. The flu. Back spasms. Budding migraine. Once I hurried over during a work day because a drop of scorching hot coconut oil sprayed into my eye, and I’m not kidding about the into.

I hate them all. They are a bunch of condescending, pompous, contemptuous pricks with a god complex, even the women, who should know better. I have exhausted my options by seeing each new person once and being done with them after our five-to-fifteen-minute appointment, and I had all but decided to never go to a doctor again, when the breast pressure issue became acute. So I booked an appointment with the one remaining woman doctor I had yet to meet.

Nothing makes me sadder than to have to tell you about the outcome of this appointment. It was disastrous. After my initial recital of the problem, she did a quick examination on me, found nothing, like I myself had found nothing, and proceeded to give me a ten-minute lecture on proper underwear, on how people used bras that were too small for them, and many times it resulted in malignant growths in their mammary glands, because the underwire would press against the tissue for years and years in a compromising way.

Now, I’m sorry, but those who know me, and if you have been reading a lot of my stories, you know, that I am nothing if not a brassiere expert, a bra go-to person, an undie connoisseur, for fuck’s sake. My mother gave me my first gift certificate to a proper lingerie boutique when I was twenty-six, and I haven’t shopped outside the box since. I had that same diatribe delivered to me by one of the sales women in the boutique when I was purchasing my very first couture bra, and haven’t needed anyone telling me those things since. I stood there, offended and humiliated, and fuming at the ears and nose, as I listened to the lady go on and on about all the women who don’t know what size they really are, and this must be what is wrong here, too, and had I ever heard of a thing called a sports bra?

If I could have found my voice, I would have told her exactly where she might shove her mention of the sports bra, but, perhaps luckily, I was so flabbergasted by the insanity of the situation and the fact that this meeting was a complete waste of my time and money, that all I could do was just stand there, mouth open, rage building up inside me until I felt there could be no more rage condensed inside a woman’s body in all this marvelous world. Don’t tell me about sports bras, you arrogant biatch, I own sports bras by the dozen, and my favorite one has a Beyoncé lyric printed on it, I wanted to say, and did, afterwards, when I exhaled everything I had wanted to say to that poor misguided woman in a phone call to my man, who had to pull all the tricks out of his bag of magic to get me to calm down. Under no circumstance am I ever going to see a doctor again, I continued, in my deranged, delayed tirade. I will chop off my own arm just to have something to throw at her when she walks by! I’ll steal some Crime Scene tape and tape her door yellow with it! I’ll change the locks and replace her toothpaste with foot cream! Okay calm down, please, he pleaded. I don’t think this is very healthy, to hex her all the way to the underworld, he said.

Fast forward a few months. With the pressure on my left breast still alive and strong, I caught the flu that has been bothering most everybody for the past few months. Skimming through available appointments online to get a doctor’s notice that I need for my work place when sick, I all but dropped my jaw on the floor, noticing the name of my beloved retired doctor on the list. Ohmygod CHOOSE, I clicked, on the verge of tears, thinking it must be a fluke, I must be hallucinating with the fever. I don’t think I had ever been that happy in my life.

“Look, I realize it’s a lot of money, and your company doesn’t cover it, but think of it this way. It has been on your mind for all this time. What is money, in the end, but paper? You’ll get your answer and, more importantly, some peace of mind. And let me tell you, usually malignant tumors don’t give any indications of their existence, which is exactly why breast cancer is so dangerous. The hurting itself signifies that it very well could be the muscle spasms you mentioned. But I suggest you go. Don’t wait. You are turning forty this year, and god forbid, if there was anything wrong, waiting a few more months, a year, is way too long. I’ll write you a referral anyway to get it checked out. I get that it’s expensive, I do. But I think you should do it. And do it as soon as possible. By the way, when are you planning your next trip to Paris? As soon as I saw you at the door, I thought ‘Oh, I must book my own spring trip to Paris soon’. You know, I was there for both my fiftieth and my sixtieth birthday! Don’t you just love how the air smells there?” This is what she said.

In the wee small hours of the morning of the examination, I listened to the caretaker bound on the front steps of my building with a huge icepick, to remove the frozen slosh, formed by the sudden up-and-down of the temperature in the past twenty-four hours and a snowstorm in between. I listened to him work carefully, step by step. I heard the plow truck arrive and plow snow. Then the delivery man dropped the paper in the mail slot. Then the kids in the upstairs apartment woke up and the piddle-paddle of their day began with running around the house, always marking it seven a.m.

I kept thinking about the wicker chair I wanted to get from Ikea. Thinking how I did not consider myself what one would call an Ikea person, I was finding my craving for the chair quite amusing, if a bit confusing. I thought about the unfinished novel I keep in my desk drawer. I thought about unfinished business and budding friendships and my mother and father. About how I had never been to New York, or Maine, or Newfoundland. Or New Zealand, or Sicily, or Lake Como. About how I still had not read The Brothers Karamazov, or finished the Neapolitan quartet, and it was already being produced as a series for HBO. About why it had to be the left one, the pretty one – face it, girls, we all have our favorite one.

The appointment was at eleven, so I had a little time in my hands, having left home early in my nervous panic. So, I did what I always do; I headed for the small marina at the foot of my favorite shopping district, and to the flea markets there.

Of course, I had just been at my barber’s a few days earlier, after neglecting to book an appointment with him for quite a while, and feeling pretty in my recently cropped hair, I was ready for action. I was all bring it on, tight press and what have you, at least I’m looking so fine, so fine I’ll blow my mind. And there it was. A gorgeous neon pink and purple striped sweater, a Sonia Rykiel for christ’s sake, just hanging there on the rack, all casual and whimsical, and exactly my size, too. Not playing too hard to get, either, she would be mine for the taking for ten euros. And did I take it? Yes! I hurried to the cash register, payed the ten for it, and wore it to my mammogram. Whatever happens, at least I’ll be the most dashing and magnificent and best-dressed person there, I incanted on my way.

Even the having to leave the sweater in the dressing room did not stop me from extracting every ounce of joy I could from the fantastic colors and the general rapture that was my new brilliant garment, and while the woman who was there to help me get organized, since I had never had a mammogram done before, was explaining about where to stand and to remember to breathe, a lot of women forgot about breathing, I did not feel at all how I thought I would feel. Even the pressing itself wasn’t as painful as it had been described to me. Even when the left side hurt a lot more than the right side, and I asked if I should start crying now or later, I did not feel at all like crying. I was high on my power sweater.

It wasn’t until after the dreaded mammogram, when there seemingly was nothing more to fear, since the ultrasound would be totally painless, that I started feeling the hype wear off. Waiting for the doctor, in the dimly lit examination room, I felt like I could very well be the only person in the world. I would wait and wait, and after no one showed up to do the ultrasound, I would get dressed, go back, and find the hallway and the waiting rooms empty. There would be no one in the reception, no doctors rushing past in their white coats, no crying children, no runny noses, no one walking by with a sideways tilt. I had told very few people about the mammogram, basically because I did not want to worry anyone, and because it would be nothing, of course it would, and because I need time to deal with my emotions, and sometimes the response can be delayed and not pretty, and I wanted to think about it before I said anything.

Suddenly I felt so sad for not having told people, at least my family. I felt horrible being there. I had a clear image of the doctor entering the room in Hannah and Her Sisters with the CAT-scan results, telling Mickey that the news was not good and here was exactly why he didn’t feel surgery would solve anything. I thought about the Marx Brothers. I regretted not having brought down my Groucho glasses-and-moustache -mask in addition to my fabulous new sweater to wear in the examination. I lifted my feet up and started playing the Cover the Fluorescent Light Game. Then the doctor came in.

What is causing the pain on the left side I guess we’ll never know. I put on the lovely sweater and counted my lucky stars. I still had both my boobs, and would get to keep them a while longer.

I still have no idea what happened in the ultrasound. I have no memory whatsoever what I talked about with the doctor after he walked in on me with my feet straight up in the air. But when I exited the dressing room, the hallway and the waiting rooms were packed. It didn’t end. The world. It didn’t end.

This is for K.K.