Boobies!

[Kathianne]

Not always so good:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/susannahbreslin/2011/11/28/the-business-about-my-breasts/

This may well be the articles that I think most women can empathize with regarding 'dread':

First page:


11/28/2011 @ 3:05PM |136,881 views

The Business About My Breasts

I go to get a mammogram.

I don’t like getting mammograms.

But, then again, who does?

1. The Mammogram.
The place I’m going is called the Breast Center. On the train, I imagine the building is in the shape of a giant, skyward-turned breast, like an enormous Claes Oldenburg sculpture of a tit, and there is a door in the side of the boob and maybe the nipple is a massive skylight.

Instead, the Breast Center is a building that looks like a hospital. I get in the elevator. I go to the right floor.

I wait in a waiting room. Eventually, someone gets me and takes me to a dressing room, where I remove everything from the waist up and put on a smock. The smock is too big. I’m tall, but the large-sized ones, I realize, are for women with massive boobs, which I do not have. I am drowning in this smock.

I go in the mammogram room. The woman doing the mammograms looks bored. I tell her that I’m nervous. She says something noncommittal. She tells me to stand close to the machine. She takes my breast and mashes it into the machine. She cranks the machine like a vise around my breast, which hurts. She keeps trying to reposition me, because my boobs aren’t very big. At one point, she takes her hand, places it on the side of my head, and cranks my head to the side, my boob still stuck in the machine. I hold my breath. The machine whirrs. We do the other side.


I go home.





Yeah it gets worse.

Worse yet, got here via this link:

http://boingboing.net/2011/12/09/the-diagnosis.html


The diagnosis (http://boingboing.net/2011/12/09/the-diagnosis.html)

By Xeni Jardin (http://boingboing.net/author/xeni_jardin) at 6:00 am Friday, Dec 9


I have breast cancer. A week ago, I had breast cancer, and the week before that, and the week before that. Maybe five, eight, even ten years ago, the first bad cell split inside me, secretly. But I didn't know. This is how I arrived at knowing.


Two friends of mine were recently diagnosed. When news of the first came (https://twitter.com/#!/HRLori), I felt sadness. When news of the second came a few weeks ago (http://www.forbes.com/sites/susannahbreslin/2011/11/28/the-business-about-my-breasts/), I felt a different kind of shock. I'd never had a mammogram. Even though I was ten years younger than the time they say you need to start (http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/breast/basic_info/mammograms.htm), it felt like time to start, and when her news came I thought: I need to do this right now. For my friends, for me. Solidarity. Something small I can do, some little action against the big unknowable that swoops down without warning and strikes the ones we love.


Around the same time, I'd became aware of a funny stiffness in a spot on my own body. But anomalies in women's bodies come and go all the time, and it was a fluid whatever-thing, something that would pass, definitely not a lump, nothing that my waking, speaking mind would grasp as danger. This anomaly must be misplaced anxiety, my logic-brain tried to explain to my lizard-brain; maybe it's me wanting to make my friend's bad news all about me...

[Kathianne]

Worth reading? Your choice. From the last link:


... The mammogram technologist saw on my chart that I'd lost a loved one to ALS (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001708/). She had too. I hugged her, and she hugged back. She folded my body into the machine, pressed some buttons, folded me another way, and the machine clicked and whirred and clicked and whirred. Then it was over. She told me to wait.


I tweeted the waiting. Inviting the internet in is something I do every day anyway, but this time it was like a shield. Nothing bad can happen in a new place if you're cracking jokes and 50,000 people are watching. You're safe out here, in here, out here.


The waiting-moment stretched out, and out, and out, and finally she returned.


Where was that thing you felt that isn't anything, she asked?


Here, I showed her.


Put your arms in the air, she said. She felt, and squinted, and her brow furrowed, and she stepped aside again. Then she returned. Come back in a few hours when the doctor is free, she said, and we'll look a little more closely with ultrasound, just to be thorough. She smiled. Maybe just go have some lunch, she said, and we'll wrap this up when you return.


The hours stretched out and out and out. I felt nervous, but it was still all normal. I was too nervous to eat, but not too nervous yet to tweet. A finger pulling down the iPhone touchscreen still yielded replies from familiar names, and this was all going to end well. I drove back to the clinic.


Dr. Kristi Funk (http://www.kristifunk.com/) is her name. How can anything go bad when the doctor's name is Funk, and there are so many funny things to tweet? She told me to lie down, put some goop on my chest, and waved a wand through the goop. The waves appeared on a screen. It looked like NASA video, something the Mars rovers might transmit home to a JPL engineer searching for distant water.


She showed me a crater in the waves, a deep one, with rough edges and a rocky ridge along the northern rim. Calcification. Badly-defined boundaries. Not the lake we'd hoped to find.


"The first thing you're going to learn about working with me is that I'm a straight shooter," Dr. Funk said. Her voice was steady and reassuring.


"That's how you know you can trust me. I'm going to tell you everything, and I'm going to tell it to you like it is."


I forget the rest of what she said, but it added up to this: the crater was cancer...

[chloe]

:laugh2: tricky

[Wind Song]

Breast thread?

[chloe]

Breast thread?

:laugh2:

[SassyLady]

I've had mammograms for as long as I can remember. I've had several cysts and a few of them I had to have drained. When I was 16 we found one behind a nipple and they put a large needle right through it to drain the cyst. Have not had one in the last 18 years .... because I truly believe the crushing of the boobies in the mammograms breaks them up and they disperse on their own.

Kathi ... thank you for this article. When I was on the board of our Family Support Group three out of the five of us in one year were diagnosed with breast cancer. Two had mastectomies and one had a lumpectomy. The two with the mastectomies had the cancer come back in their other organs and spine within five years and are both dead. The one with the lumpectomy eventually had a mastectomy. My sister has had breast cancer since she was 38 (8 years now).....sometimes I feel like the lady in this article....I always hold my breath when the radiologist goes in the other room to look at the x-rays...........it feels like death is always looking over my shoulder when I'm sitting in that room in that smock.