single with cheese

4 January 2006

R, my girlfriend, and I arrive at the radiologists’ office, early in the morning. I am twenty or thirty years younger than almost every other woman in the waiting room. Many of them are overweight, have thinning hair, or both. I don’t belong here.

I wait for almost an hour until my name is called. As I follow the nurse down the hall, I suddenly have tears in my eyes. I am scared.

“You can put that on,” the nurse says, gesturing at the garment on the table, “open in front.”
The vest is enormous, wide enough for a linebacker, constructed of light blue paper. I put it on over my wide legged brown herringbone wool trousers. I pull the vest shut and cross my arms.

The doctor, a Sarah Jessica Parker look alike, comes in. She is sweet and caring and kind. I start to cry, and she looks at me with intense blue eyes and asks, “Oh honey, what’s wrong?”

I explain that I was already upset, that the whole thing is upsetting, and she asks, alarmed, “Because of me?”

I smile, despite everything, and tell her that she is not the impetus of my tears.

After the doctor examines my right breast (yes, it’s still there), she uses a small round sticker to mark its location.

A lab tech leads me to another room and enters some data into a computer. First, she stands in front of me and opens my vest. She reaches around my back and wraps a small apron around waist, covering my pelvis. She studies my breast to figure out how exactly to position it for the mammogram, and then, using her large warm hands, compresses my breast several times. It is exactly the way I squeeze a large cheeseburger so that I can shove it into my mouth.

Finally, satisfied, she moves me toward the machine, where I stand with my breast just above a metal platform. She uses the computer to control the machine, and another heavy metal part moves down toward my breast, and smushes my flesh. Because I am so flat, I have to stand extremely close to the machine, so that when the upper part moves down, my face is smashed against it. I imagine an enormous breasted woman, standing a foot away with her perfect, giant breasts resting comfortably on the platform. My cheeseburger does not allow this.

She takes the x-rays, and then releases the upper part slightly, but says urgently, “Don’t move! Just breathe.” My cheek is pressed against the cold metal.

After several seconds, she allows me to move, and then I look at the screen. There, in black and white silhouette, is the slow, flat shape of my breast.

“I can’t see anything,” she says, and leaves to call in the doctor.

Dr. SJP returns, and they analyze the image, turning knobs to increase the brightness of the picture. “Dense,” Sarah Jessica says.

Don't make fun of it, I think. It tries just as hard as the other breasts.

“It’s tissue, as opposed to…air?” I ask. “Or fat?”

“Well, you’re young,” Dr. Parker says, nodding. "It's hard to see anything in dense tissue."

My entire life, my breasts have been humiliatingly, embarrassingly small, and now they are not only inconveniently flat, but unhelpfully dense?

They release me to the waiting room, where I wipe off my tears and tell R that nothing showed up. R, ironically, is studying cancer care in the UK, and knows quite a bit about “world class care.” She reassures me that it is good to have both tests.

Eventually, another nurse calls me, and I go into a different, smaller room, with an examination bed and another large machine with a computer screen. I undress, put on another vest, and wait. Against the wall, there is a plastic case holding three white plastic bottles. Like ketchup bottles at a diner. The plastic case says, in large, bold, italic capital letters, “THERMASONIC.” I can’t help but sing it quietly to the tune of a now infamous eighties song. That’s right. You know the one.

The doctor returns and puts my meaningless x-ray up on the lighted board. She takes a bottle of a plastic warmer and explains. “I’m going to put this gel on your breast. This test uses sound waves.” She spreads the gel over my skin, and then lifts the handheld attachment to the machine. It looks like an electric razor. She runs it over my breast, and studies the wavy black and white images on the screen.

After a few seconds, she is still frowning. She looks at my breast, and then back at the screen. “Hm…well, it’s not a cyst.”

?!?

“If it were a cyst, it would show up as fluid.” She tries again, and then stops. “I’m just not seeing anything. It could just be glandular tissue.”

She takes out a small plastic ruler and measures my breast.

“You have to measure my breast?” I ask, nonchalantly. In fifteen years of despising my breasts, even I have never measured them.

“I have to note how far it is from the nipple,” she replies. “I can’t see anything, so we’re going to refer you to a breast surgeon to get a biopsy. It could be nothing. Some women just have lumpy breasts.”

So now, they are not only absurdly, ludicrously small; blandly, inconveniently flat, irritatingly, unhelpfully dense, but also potentially lumpy?

Lumpy? Like poorly mixed cookie batter hiding crystallized chunks of brown sugar? Or more like a crummy mattress pocked with hard patches?

My cheeseburger is small and lumpy.

Really, more of a Steak ‘N’ Shake single than a Whopper. More In ‘N’ out than Corner Bistro. It goes well, I suppose, with my milkshake.