Mashed flat

I was originally planning to start this blog on my birthday, which is still almost three weeks away. Then something happened that put me right smack up against an entire panoply of major fears all at once, so I figured there’s no time like the present. In short: I had a mammogram on Thursday morning, as one does when one reaches a Certain Age. It was my second mammogram ever. And on Thursday afternoon, I got the kind of phone call you really don’t want to get, the one where your doctor tells you there was something on the mammogram that wasn’t there the previous time, and would you please call this number to schedule a follow-up at your earliest opportunity?

I’m not going to make you endure even a fraction of the anxiety I felt. It was just a particularly dense and lumpy bit of tissue that needed to be mashed a little flatter to prove its harmlessness. I do not have breast cancer. But I didn’t know that on Friday morning when I called the radiology department at UCSF Medical Center and left a message for the person in charge of scheduling mammograms. I didn’t know it all through the long weekend, while I was waiting for that person to call me back after the Labor Day holiday. I didn’t know it when I got a call on Tuesday morning telling me I could go in first thing Wednesday. And I didn’t know it yesterday morning, when I was standing there having my left breast squished and smashed vertically, horizontally, and at a 45-degree angle by paddles of various shapes and sizes. By that point, I was terrified.

With every additional image, every time the radiologist told me to hold my breath and not move, I became more and more convinced that I was about to get very bad news indeed. I was wondering who I would call, who I could depend on if I needed help getting through treatment. I was wallowing in self-pity: “Wahhh, I am a single woman living alone, I have no one, I will have to do this all by myself.” And then I remembered all the ways my friends come through for each other, big and small, and how I’m sure they’ll come through for me if I need them. By the time the radiologist told me that everything was fine and my left breast could return to its normal un-squashed condition for another year, I was — well, I wasn’t calm, but at least I was no longer on the verge of hysterical tears. I knew that whatever my problems might be, “having to do this all by myself” wasn’t among them.

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