Baseline
One of the special things a woman gets to do when she turns 40, if she’s otherwise healthy and doesn’t have a Super Red Flag family history of breast cancer, is go in for her baseline mammogram. I started working at 6 a.m. yesterday to allow time for my virgin trek to Kaiser’s radiology department, where they offer walk-in mammograms on Mondays and Wednesdays. (For anyone keeping tabs on my health care righteousness, I also visited the nurse practitioner for a pap smear, a tetanus update, flu shot, skin check, thyroid screen, and Xanax refill–which, believe me, I needed after all that.)
As my educated readers undoubtedly know, the first mammogram is a “baseline,” against which doctors will measure changes in my breast annually or thereabouts for the rest of my life. Paying attention to this stuff is critical, given that about 1 in 8 American women gets breast cancer in a lifetime. For the past decade, since I did some work on breast cancer during my Master’s degree, I’d been wondering who among us would be the “1s,” especially given that several–several!–good friends’ mothers died of breast cancer before my friends were adults.
So far, the closest 1s to me have been my maternal aunt (twice cursed with the ugly beast, and amazingly resilient) and my best friend growing up, Missy. And lots and lots of acquaintances.
Katie and I visited Missy and another childhood friend Gloria over Thanksgiving. Missy (40), who after being diagnosed with pretty aggressive cancer in one breast, had a double mastectomy last year. This really shocked me, given that I grew up with her flashing her adolescent buds, then her teen knobs, then her big gozangas at me my whole life. They were like second cousins to me, and now they were just gone, kaput? Disorienting, indeed.
After a few glasses of champagne, Missy was generous enough to show us the second cousin replacements she now sported, courtesy of a very skilled plastic surgeon. Damn, were they impressive. Not all fakey fakey, but proud and soft and perky, with pale pink aureoles and pretty little flat, artful nipples–quite different, in this last respect from the assertive ‘rocket knobs’ she use to sport (hey, that’s what we called ‘em). Under the aureoles, the thinnest horizontal scars. Amazing, and easy to imagine in a bikini. Having come of feminist age at happy-hairy UCSC with that poster of the open-armed, tattooed breast cancer warrior-survivor emblazoned on my psyche, 
Missy’s post-cancer boobs were truly a surprise. I was happy for her to have this gorgeous rack as a condolence gift, but much happier she survived to continue raising her boys and loving her husband and being the total ornery BIOTCH she is.
So anyway, all this to say, I was pretty interested in the experience of getting my baseline mammogram.
First I met the radiologist, a comfortably rounded, short, smart mooj who instantly put me at ease. (Let’s call her Mary.) She bade me to take off my upper clothes, wipe down my breasts and armpits with a wetnap, and don a midriff/half-smock that opens in the front–totally different from the buttcrack dress you usually get, so already you feel like a woman (well, girl; I think mine had pink rabbits on it). Then she invited me into her tidy, equipment-filled hollow and explained in careful detail how the whole thing would go and why, for my own sake, I should do exactly what she said–mainly, let her ‘place’ my breast between the plates and then keep the hell still while she took some snapshots.
These things I obligingly did, and, yeah, it was weird. You’re standing there (yeah, standing) with your poor boob on a glossy black shelf and then, with a push of a button, Mary brings the plastic ‘plate’ above down against the top of your boob and cranks a knob until the whole thing, and what feels like half your sternum, is pancaked in the vise. What I didn’t expect was to be able to glance down and see the miserable flesh squashed there like…I don’t know, I can’t think of a metaphor. Like a big boobcake. And you do that for two angles per boob, one angle being very awkwardly diagonal.
But Mary and I had a few laughs in the process. Watching her deftly lift my left bosom for shot #2 with a straight face, it strikes me that this is what this woman does all day long, what she gets paid for. I call her The Breastmaster and compliment her skills. We laugh. I ask her how a woman like Katie (or God forbid, Marce), whose breasts would barely fill a small ladle, can even get her lil’ tittie in a vise without, I don’t know, having her nose scraped when the top plate descends. I mean her Adam’s apple has a more distinct profile than her breasts, not that that’s a bad thing at all. Mary tells me she has smaller plates for such individuals. Marce, I seriously want to come to your baseline appointment and take pics. That would be priceless.
When it was over, I asked Mary if she’d mind showing me the films, just to see what they looked like. For a second she seemed wary, but I assured her I wouldn’t make any assumptions or freak out about what I saw. Convinced I was just curious, she let me wait in the waiting room while she unloaded at the slides and then conspiratorialy “psssst’d” me back into her hollow. Like a Vegas card dealer, she placed all four on the light box and waited for my reaction.
I wish I could show you the real slides, but I’ll do the best I can with Google Images.
What I saw was moons at night. Four half moons, all mysterious and distant, with a magic topography all aglow against a dark-space background.
Boob: Moon:
(p.s., I think the boob above has something suspicious going on with it, but it’s the closest image to my moonboob. I didn’t see any such masses but I’m sure that doesn’t mean boo(b).)
Anyway, so I completed my baseline mammogram. And, walking home, I had all these other thoughts about baselines–what is your baseline breast health, what is your emotional baseline, your financial baseline, your spiritual baseline, and how do you get in touch with and keep track of it, and improve on it?–all that great material, but I ain’t got time to write it up, so I’ll just leave it with you.
Okay: loves to you, and prayers for all the strong breast-cancer stricken, and surviving, moonboob moojes.
