My Boobs Are Terrorists

The letter came last Saturday. It was from the doctor’s office, so I thought for a moment it was just a statement, an accounting of my visit charges.

I threw it on the table and got busy doing whatever it is I do. My grandmother called it “putzing around.” But I have learned the hard way that I should open all mail, no matter what I think it might be, so I opened it a couple of hours later.

The words leaped off the page straight into my brain.

Thank you for choosing the Piedmont Hospital Breast Health Center for your recent screening mammogram. Our radiologist has reviewed your mammogram and has recommended additional imaging. Please be aware that most findings are benign (not cancer.)

I carefully placed the letter back on the table, as if to avoid awakening it. Although I saw what it said, even comprehended it, I went into automatic denial. I didn’t think thoughts like “that can’t be right; this must be a mistake” “I’m not going to worry about this; it’s nothing, I’m sure.” No, I simply blocked it out. It was as if I’d never opened it. Since it was Saturday, I couldn’t call to make the follow up appointment anyway, so I just kept putzing.

As I have confessed before, I am nothing if not anal, hyper-organized and, lately, forgetful, so I scheduled a phone call for Monday morning. As I look back now, I am pretty pleased with my silly self for actually putting it out of my mind until then. Not another mammogram thought penetrated my consciousness until Outlook reminded me this past Monday morning.

The resulting appointment happened at 2:15 P.M. on Thursday (today). I woke up feeling awful, due to Atlanta’s 5734 pollen count, second highest in history. Either that or I am coming down with a cold from hell. So my mind was kind enough to cancel my day for me – no Silver Sneakers class, no housework, no…oh, shit! The mammogram!

The fear started poking me in the side of my head with its index finger. “Hello, it’s time for you to pay attention, here. Things are about to get dicey.” After I really woke up, it washed over me like the hot water in the shower I was in.

Again came the self-talk. “Stop it. Worrying will not change anything. You read the letter. It’s probably nothing.” And I was able to keep the fear at bay. Well, I kept it at bay until I was sitting in the crowded waiting room with my spiffy cropped smock on and the technician came in and called my name. I started untying the ties on my smock, thinking she would say the usual “okay, you can get dressed. The results will be sent to your doctor.” Not this time.

Instead, she ushered me back into the mammogram room for a sixth image in that torture contraption. After the mammary smashing stopped, the technician said “I’ll give this to the radiologist and we’ll let you know if he wants an ultra-sound, too.”

I went back to that same crowded waiting room. This is first time I actually looked into the faces of the other women who were undoubtedly suffering the same levels of concern. Their faces signaled varying levels of stress. One youngish woman was texting, furiously. Her expression was passive, but her left foot was twitching like a metronome. Two of the women pretended to read pages that had fallen out of the mangled magazines that had obviously borne the brunt of hundreds of freaked-out hands.

One woman was not even trying to hide her fear. She had been pulled out of the waiting room for imaging, re-imaging, and ultra-sound. Each time she returned to the waiting room she sat down, hard, in the chair and buried her face in one hand. She looked at her watch; glanced furtively over her shoulder, which was positioned right next to the doorway through which the technicians retrieved us.

This surveying of the other victims – yes, that’s the way I was starting to think of us – only distracted me for a short time. I grabbed my Blackberry, hoping there would be some hugely important email that would wrench my attention away from the sickening turbulence in my stomach. Damn! We were so far into the entrails of the building that I had no signal for data communications.

I grabbed one of the tattered pages of the most recent magazine, Ladies Home Journal. There is a recipe for some chicken dish. It called for so many ingredients that I didn’t have in the house I would have needed a loan from the bank just to make it. Looked good, though.

I hear my name called. “Oh, shit. I’m scared. I’m really scared. What if I have cancer? Who’s going to take care of me after they fill my body with poison and I have what my friend, who has ovarian cancer, calls “chemo flu? Will I have a lumpectomy or will the need to remove my entire breast? Both breasts? Some people have both breasts removed. At least I don’t have to worry about how it will look, since I don’t have a man in my life. Finally, I’ll be able to wear double-breasted jackets because I’ll be flat-chested, which works best for those. I am so scared. Breathe, breathe. Why can’t I breathe?

“Ms. Lezlie, would you come with me into room 6 please?”

She has papers in her hand. I don’t see anyone who looked like a “he”, in fact there is no desk in the room, no computer screens, not even chairs. “Ms. Lezlie, it was just overlapping tissue. Please sign here and here and here, and then you can get dressed. We are all done.

Once, when we were little, my sister accidentally hit me in the stomach with a baseball bat she was swinging from side to side. It knocked the breath out of me and I was sure I was dying. That’s what I was feeling now. I wanted to jump up and down, scream, hug the technician, and do my happy dance. But the technician seemed totally unaware of how her words were affecting me.

“Overlapping what?” I breathed. “Breast tissue is clumpy, like a bunch of grapes. Sometimes one of those clumps will sit on top of another one and make it appear to be a tumor. That’s why we have to flatten the breast as much as possible when we do the mammogram. You’re fine. Just continue to do your routine screening every year. Have a nice day.”

I floated down the hallway and out the double doors. I stopped in the rest room and gazed into the mirror for a full minute. I took two or three deep breaths and walked back to my car in the massive parking deck. It was raining pretty hard and people were trying to stay under the building’s overhang to avoid getting wet. My electronic key chirped, I pulled the handle and sat heavily in the driver’s seat.

And then, I cried.