Of Mountains and Molehills

Gather round, darlings! If I recall correctly, I promised you a boobie story.  I shall not disappoint.  Though you may want to get a snack first, cuz’ this may take a while (haha, that will be funny later). In this story, my dangling participles will be played by themselves.  As for the role of me, please cast a slightly more endowed Julia Roberts in your mind, but don’t tell her.  I couldn’t afford the royalties.

First, Honeybuns, before we begin, you must know a simple fact.  I have lovely chesticles.  I do.  They are not perfect by any anatomical stretch - one looks Southeast, the other Southwest - and they lack the melon-like moundedness of my younger years, but they host a classical cleavage that any Roman statue would envy, and Ms. Barbara Streisand herself, possessor of THE most lovely cleavage on planet earth, might just nod in approval were she to glance my handsome hills and voluptuous valley.

Alas, now that I am no longer breastfeeding, only one human has the routine privilege of viewing my modest maidens (lucky Guy, that lucky guy), if you don’t count the occasional doctor.  That was, until I turned 50.

50 is the magic age at which the medical world collectively agrees that: 1. You will now begin to dismantle and disintegrate, piece by rusty piece, at an ever increasing trajectory, and 2. They will announce said deterioration to you on a semi-annual basis by beginning every sentence with the preamble, “Now that you are over 50...”.  

Cancer screening has become the new pass-time.  There have been many. Usually, they’re pretty straightforward; a simple needle into the neck, the typical swabbing of pink parts, a camera where a camera should never, never go. But this time, when they suspected breast cancer, they got out the big guns. 

First came the industrial mammogram. This isn’t the little cutie they use for the beginners. This one employs giant plates that could crush an old car, run by a severe woman who was raised by the descendants of Gengus Khan, on mountain goat milk she squoze herself.

Starting well above the shoulder and dragging all my skin from the chin down along with it, she began pressing my bucksome blobs into oblivion. But by far the best moment of the entire affair was when, not once, but twice, workMEN walked in during my partially nude photoshoot. Tool belts and all.  Apparently, the exam room had, until recently, been used as a thoroughfare and a storage space. Folks had gotten accustomed to passing through as a shortcut to a parallel hallway. However, on this particular day, it had become an exam room once again, only no one thought to tell Hank and Roy. 

When the first fellow walked in (yes, sweet cheeks, they came in separately), I was, as you can imagine, FLAT OUT shocked. Only, I’m not flat, and my “they” were definitely OUT.  So was he; he dashed out of the room with his clipboard as a face shield like he was taking fire in Nam.  But by the time the second fellow sauntered through (ya’ saw that guy coming, didn’t you?), I was irate. AYE AYE AYE RATE!

 “It’s OK! It’s OK!“ The technician placated in a thick accent from a country where apparently all breasts are the property of the commonwealth. 

“NO!  It is most certainly NOT O-K! It’s not OK with me at all! Look, I am not a shy girl, but I reserve the right to decide to whom I show my Girls, and I did NOT choose them!“ (for the A-types in the audience, formal complaints were made and wimpy apologies given. Of course.)

Later, when the results of this second mammary-mashing were “concerning”, it was decided that one of my poor little lady lobes needed a looksie from the inside. However, because I was on blood thinners, I was prepped three times on three different days for the procedure before I actually was able to go through with it. Risk of internal bleeding and whatnot. Geez. 

Note, if you are the woozy-ish type, this is where you skip down to the last paragraph where we “look back and laugh”. Well, you might laugh. I might not. Too soon. Too soon. 

I sat gowned-up in a waiting nook in the hallway, with all my crap in a bag beside me, pretending I cared about the magazine in my lap, avoiding eye contact with passers-by, and waiting for my turn on what I had been boastfully told was their “New, state of the art, Stereotactic Core Biopsy machine”.

(Cue ominous, suspenseful music…)

Here’s the drill (pun so very intended)… (please read this part in the chipper voice of the the narrator from How Stuff Works):

They lay you down on a funny table with a hole in it, which sounds cozy but is totally not.  They suspend one of your tender twins through a hole in the table with an arm up by your head, with its sweet sibling sort of smashed along side of you. They try to arrange your limbs all akimbo so that you can tolerate being in this position for “just 45 minutes”. Of course, that doesn’t count the time for adjusting, or to identify the biopsy spot, etc.  But let’s pretend it’s 45 minutes. 

(This is where the storyteller starts giggling, because she knows the end of the story, and you do not yet.  Estimated time-frames are cute and super arbitrary.)

Next, they raise you up like a car on a mechanic’s lift so everyone can see under your chassis, then they kick on the booby smasher (yes, the table has one too!).  Your face is pressed into the table blocking your view from your sweet little peach, so you can’t see what is happening, but OH, honey, you know.  You. Know.  Now a random stranger with cold hands and no conscience is down there (maybe the maintenance man? Who knows!?), holding your fleshy friend like a wet rag that they are trying to wring water out of. They twist one way and then another, then close the peach-press, take a picture, twist again, smash, take a picture, twist again, smash, take a picture…

This continues until they believe they have their target lined up juuuust riiiiight. The reason being, they have to avoid major blood vessels while still navigating to the source of the concern to biopsy it, and everybody’s road map is different. Because of the blood thinners, it was particularly important that no major blood vessels get nicked; risk of hemorrhaging, yada yada.  Finally, someone official is satisfied, and then they tighten the vice beyond all human tolerance. I guess this is in case of an earthquake that might somehow jiggle your jello jug loose from the vice.  They know it’s tight enough when your toes curl and your eyes bulge.  You are told NOT TO MOVE as though the earth’s orbit depended on it.  Repeatedly.

A lot of clunking and cold wiping later, and some little voice from somewhere out there in the vastness casually says, “little sting”, while simultaneously unleashing a murder hornet on your pretty pressed pillow.   They numb you up at the point where the tools are to invade your person, and then they begin what can only be described as drilling a core sample to Antarctica.  Picture shoving a drinking straw through a watermelon and pulling out the fleshy section that gets jammed inside the tube. It’s not as big as a drinking straw, of course, more like a pencil lead, but being that I usually keep my fleshy bits on the INSIDE of my body, this process could be defined as FREAKING DISCONCERTING. Most fortunately, you are all numbed up for this part. But not to worry, little chickadees, you will get to feel it aaaaalllll later, when the drugs wear off.

Anyhoo, as they work, they remove a sample, leave you in the vice grip on your face, go into another room, examine the sample under a microscope, make sure they got what they were hoping for, and then perhaps come and get some more (of course, you know that means they came and got some more!). Then, once they have what they were looking for, they drop what is called a “clip” into your Gucci bag; a tiny metal marker that is left behind in the location where they removed the biopsy sample. This is so that, if results come back as cancerous, they know exactly where to head to find the location of the cancer (no, you do not get to set off airport alarms.  Dangit).  No guessing. This is precision machinery, people! 

Pretty smart, of course. That is, if your fancy machine is working on Tuesdays. 

Turns out, on the day that I was there, (do I need to say it?  Can’t you already tell what’s coming?  You can, because YOU my friend, are smart)  their machine suddenly... broke.  Yes, broke, like an elevator stuck between floors with a panicked passenger imprisoned within, only in this scenario our prisoner is my tender torso tuber!

Let’s just say things got pretty dicey from there. The marker wouldn’t drop. Try, and try, and try as they may, (and by “may”, that gentle, passive word that makes it seem like they were only considering it, like a polite British museum tour guide, when the word most certainly is DID, like a New York cab driver) the white coat brigade could not get the marker to drop. Discussion was had.  The new hoped-for solution was trying a part from a different machine. State-of-the-art, my friends. So I layed there whilst they went to rustle up spare parts from the old machine, all the while, the auger remained embedded deeply in my sad little pec sack. 

Alas, alas, my patient reader, Clip Dropper Number Two was faulty as well.  Now, when medical personnel have an idea that they don’t want a patient to know about, they think it is very clever to speak in a code that only edjumacated doctors and nurses can understand.  What they don’t realize, is that it is the same code moms and dads use when talking about waiting till the kids are in bed to have ice cream because there’s not enough for everyone, and parents have first dibs because Darwin said so (look it up).  It sounds like this: “Hey, after they… do you want…?  There’s only enough…” but in doctor talk it goes like this: “Hey, what if we extend the… then maybe it will…”  

Nothin’ makes me sit up and take notice (or lay really still to protect the earth’s gravitational pull on the moon) like someone talkin’ secret mom-code around me.  I then followed the process carefully as I heard and felt them take a third sample, or, in layman’s terms, DRILL OUT MORE OF MY MOMMYGLAND.

Yah.  Didn’t work.  More technical tool talk was had, and the words “manual drop”  floated to the surface of the jargon jar.  Now, I don’t know about you, but for me, nothing instills confidence like the professionals abandoning their precision robots to do it the old fashioned way.

In the meantime, we’ve been going on a couple of hours in the face-down, spine-arched, smashed-face position. My knees and shoulder were aching, my lower back was killing me, my neck was sore from being twisted to the side, and I was repeatedly told to “hold still“ every time I tried to create some modicum of comfort by moving just a millimeter or two.  It felt like they had forgotten that a living person was literally attached to the machine they were fussing over. I began to weep. Quiet tears rolled down my cheek as the white-coats continued to discuss strategy like football coaches on the sidelines.

At some point, a nurse realized that there was a tearful human being growing out of the little white whale they had harpooned.  With a puzzled tone, she simply asked, “What’s wrong?”

What’s wrong?!  I have a javelin through my left labradoodle and you guys can’t get it out! You can’t figure out your marevelous “State of the Art” machine, you won’t let me move, the medicine keeps wearing off and I have no idea when or how I’m going to get out!  OH. AND BY THE WAY.  YOU ARE LOOKING FOR CANCER!!!

Yah, I didn’t say all that then, but now I wish I had. Somewhere in the room, the code-talker asked, “What should we do with...?”

“Throw it away.”

Yah, sample #3, the one they took to try to jog the machine went... in the red bin. They didn’t even offer to let me take it home (what would I do with it??? I don’t know! Bury it, float it down the creek on a raft for a tiny Viking funeral! Anything but the garbage. Grrr).

Finally, the clip was “dropped”. Two and a half hours from the time they put me in the can crusher, I was finally done.

But OH HO HO HO NO!!! Hold the cell phone, sister, I wasn’t! (I’m so sorry. Yes, there’s more.  If you need a break, I understand.  It’s a lot to process).  It turns out that after a breast biopsy, they need to do a follow up mammogram immediately to discern the exact location of that thar’ lil’ marker; sort of a “before” pic for later comparison.  Also, they want to see if you have any unmacerated mammary matter left.  

When it was all well and truly over, they bandaged my little blowhole better, wrapped my chest in ace bandages and ice packs, and sent me out to the waiting room to my poor husband, who was perplexed at how long it had taken. Apparently, no one had bothered to tell him what was going on. Not the first time this has happened (like seriously. One time he thought I died in surgery when it was hours long and no one bothered to come tell him why). 

On the way home, I held my chest tightly over every bump in the road as feeling returned to my little buddy, and felt sorry for everyone who has ever, EVER had any sort of work done on her bosom friends. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like, and blessedly, I didn’t have to.  

Results were negative.  No cancer.  Blessed boobies. No insult to go with their injury. And while I am indeed grateful, it certainly was one of those mountain-out-of-my-molehills situations. 

So, that’s my boobie story. I know it was long, but not as long as the procedure itself, so now you have time to go make a sandwich. Oh, and for those of you who are deeply, I say, DEEPLY offended by the voyeuristic verbiage in this post all about my she-vage, I can only say, Darlings, don’t you know me by now? I always keep my promises.