Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

Flatly fine

I get tons of junk email. Back before I knew better I had my e-mail address on a web page, some 'bot found it, and now it's just too late to escape. A couple times a day I wade through the spam, wearing out the delete key, trying not to miss the occasional legitmate message from my aunt about Christmas dinner or a joke from a friend that is actually funny enough to read.

Anyway, it's interesting the way the junk comes in waves. A few months ago it was all about Christian dating services. The latest wave seems to be for breast enhancement herbal supplements.

Susie recently explained to Victor the idea behind the "pencil test." I have never passed a test like I pass the pencil test. If the pencil test were the SATs, I'd have had a free ride to Harvard. There was a time when that bothered me, but no longer.

I'm an A-cup, barely. I could probably buy my foundation garments in the girls' section of Target (and come to think of it, that might be a cheap way of doing things.) When I was heavier I actually made it into a B-cup, and that's what I was shortly before my thirtieth birthday.

I was getting dressed for work one morning and noticed that my bra did not fit right. Weird, I thought, adjusting the straps. Still didn't fit. What the hell? I went to the mirror. Since I don't generally check myself out, it dawned pretty slowly...my left breast was bigger. (Bigger than it had been, that is, as well as bigger than the right one.)

Thinking this was probably not the growth spurt I'd been waiting for since I was 13, I looked around the medicine cabinet until I found the "How to do your breast self-exam" pamphlet. I never bothered with the self-exam. My breasts were small but dense, nothing but fibrous tissue. I figured I'd never feel a lump.

Well, this time I did. The lump itself felt about the size of a quarter, and the rest of the size change was just swelling. I went to my doctor. "I don't mind the increase, but I'd prefer to be symmetrical," I told her. She felt around, and called in another doctor to feel around, and finally said that the lump didn't seem consistant with a tumor, but they wanted a mammogram to be sure.

The first mammogram appointment I could get was the day of the office Christmas party, but I wanted an answer sooner rather than later. I made the appointment. The receptionist at the radiologist got rather snippy when I gave her my birthdate: "We don't do mammograms on women under forthy unless there's a problem."

No shit? Are women under 40 clammoring to have mammograms? "I have a lump," I said. And suddenly I was scared. There is a problem.

I was just getting over a rather rough patch...the end of my marriage, a layoff, a few funerals too many. Had it happened a year earlier, I probably wouldn't have even cared, but by the time my lump appeared things were looking brighter and I was actually pleased to be in the land of the living. I didn't particularly want that in jeopardy.

I went to the radiologist. First they put me in a closet...really, it was about half the size of a discount store fitting room stall, with a louvered closet door...and I changed from my shirt into a paper vest. After sitting in the closet reading an out-of-date Time magainze from cover to cover (twice) I got called in for the mammogram.

The plate your breast gets smashed on has a little outline...place boob here. The thing was, even in my swollen state, I was too small to hit the outline. On the right side, which they wanted for comparrision, there was not nearly enough breast to smash. The technician was extremely irked, and kept barking at me to stand closer to the machine. Normally I don't let people push me around, but at that point I was trying so hard not to cry that I couldn't give her the piece of my mind she so richly deserved.

She eventually got a few shots, but told me in a thoroughly disgusted voice that the films would probably be worthless, so I needed to keep my vest on and wait in the closet until the radiologist saw them and decided what to do. A few readings of Time later, the radiologist knocked on the closet door and told me that the films were inconclusive, so they were going to do an ultrasound. I didn't like the doctor either...he had slicked-back hair and suspenders, like Michael Douglas in Wall Street. He also had that "thanks for being so flat-chested that we need to waste more time on you" tone.

I had a different technician for the ultrasound. She was slightly less bitchy...she was at least sympathetic when I started uncontrolable shivering when she covered my chest with the blue gel. In August that might have been soothing, but it was December, and I'm always cold anyway. But when she frowned at the monitor and mumbled "ah, there it is," and I said "What? What do you see?" she would only answer "The radiologist will discuss the findings."

After I finally got dressed and was allowed into an office, rather than the closet, the findings were still inconclusive. The lump didn't look like a typical tumor. They told me to come back in six weeks to see if anything changed.

I guess it was a good sign that they weren't saying "Oh my God, operate now!" but the "wait six weeks" wasn't terribly reassuring. And I did not have my wits about me. A couple years ago a friend of mine had a lump, but she also had a close friend who is a radiologist. He told her to screw "watchful waiting" and get the biopsy right away.

Luckily it didn't take six weeks. By Christmas the swelling had gone down, and in another week or so I could no longer feel the lump. When I did go back for my recheck I had a different doctor, and he did the ultrasound himself. He was much better than anyone I'd seen on the first visit, angling the monitor so I could see it and explaining to me that based on what he could still see, the lump appeared to be a fluid-filled cyst. He told me it was probably hormonal and that it might come back.

It hasn't, at least not to the point where I notice a size difference. The next time my bra didn't fit it was because I'd lost about twenty pounds and dropped back to the training bra size range.

So I do laugh when I get the junk mail that says "Don't you want firmer, bigger breasts?" Been there, done that, I think, and no, I don't particularly care to do it again. Delete.

Posted by Nic at November 29, 2003 10:54 AM | TrackBack