I've been thinking lately about the woman who takes my mammograms. I think it's because I'll have to decide whether or not I want to continue having mammograms with her, or go to Boston, to MGH, from now on. I recently found some notes I scribbled a few years ago to follow up my original piece, The Clampdown. Here they are.
A year later, I am back having a mammogram with the same technician. She is short, about five feet tall. The walls are festooned with family pictures, her family, I assume--handsome kids, happy. There's a new cartoon on the wall, showing a man standing in a johnnie with his penis in the clampdown: "If women controlled medicine," it says. "Manogram." Or testicals in a testegram. "Go on, put your boys in there! Can you feel the pinch? Good, now, don't move."
We try sitting, then standing, then sitting again. She grunts, sighs. I almost expect her to swear, or toss up her hands and say "That's it! I can't get your freakin' boob in the right place!" I feel, again, too small chested, too tall, my rib cage too big and bony. A freak, basically. "Do you have to work this hard for everyone, or is it just me?"
She turns and smiles, "Oh," she says, "I have to wheel and deal everyone. People think my job is so boring, but it's not. Everyone's a different size and shape. Everyone's a challenge."
A few years later, this year, to be exact, I am back, and the same cartoon hangs on the wall. I watch as the technician uses a piece of tape to pick up the small sticky bits of paper backing that have come off the round stickers she's put around a few moles on my breasts in order to mark them on the films. This has taken no time, this year's mammogram--I haven't felt too small or too tall or too bony, but rather, just right. The technician finds the perfect spots for my, ah, girls, right away, they comply, she takes the pictures, and we're done. I leave feeling less-freakish than before, and strangely, as if I've just conquered something. As I climb into the car, I wonder if I'd somehow grown bigger, or if, perhaps, we'd just finally figured it out.
In retrospect, I wonder if the first film showed something that she knew I'd have to come back for, and that since I would have to come back for retakes and magnifications anyway, she had opted not to make a fuss about the next ones. Had she seen something? Probably. That must be one of the hardest parts of her job--not saying anything, keeping the smile on, being efficient, timely, and remembering to pick up those little round sticky things. Sticking to the rituals. Not breaking the rhythm.
When I do come back, she is extra nice. The films don't take long at all, but she uses special magnifying equipment to zoom in on the iffy spot on my left breast, and I am sweating bullets. My right breast has the day off. When I leave, she tells me "Good luck to you."
I remember the very first mammogram I had with her, and how very far we've come. I am grateful for the continuity of connection and care, that after all these years, it is she who has "wheeled and dealed" me, and found the cancer. As I head out the door, I realize I don't know her name.
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