Waiting

I was fifty eight when I first noticed the indentation in my left breast after showering one morning. “Hmmm, that’s interesting,” I thought. I felt around but didn’t find a lump. I forgot about it until my next shower and again let it flutter to the back of my mind. I wasn’t afraid. I had faced the most frightening thing in life two years before when my daughter was diagnosed with stage four synovial cell sarcoma. I ignored it for a few more days before I decided I should make an appointment with my ob/gyn. I was due for my regular exam anyway.

She looked me over and felt me up, then wrote an order for a diagnostic mammogram. Explaining that I would have my usual mammogram and then an ultrasound if it was deemed necessary, she told me I could get dressed. “Did you feel anything?” I asked. “No,” she said. I am not sure she would have told me if she had.

I scheduled the procedure; the earliest they could fit me in required a two week wait. I told my husband and asked him to go with me for the appointment. The waiting was not very hard; I stayed busy and only thought about it a couple of times a day. I called my best friend, who was a breast cancer survivor, and told her. She made me promise to call after my appointment and let her know what we found out.

My husband had a dream one night during those two weeks that I was having a heart attack and wouldn’t let him call 911. He could feel my heart beating like crazy and the numbers on his phone were all backwards. Then he realized that he had to call 119 to get help. The same night I had a dream that I hung sculptures of the Mad Hatter and the Jabberwocky on my living room wall. I am sure that both dreams have deep psychological implications.

Thelma & Louise

What the hell were we training them for?

I was the first girl in my sixth grade class to wear a bra, and I hated it. I was sure that everyone could see the straps through my clothes. My first bra had little flowers at the junction of the cups and shoulder straps; I yanked them off because they poked out the front of my shirt like two extra nipples poorly placed. My mother called it a “training” bra. What the hell were we training them for? The Mammary Olympics? The boys in my class took great pleasure in pulling the elastic back of my bra and letting it snap as they ran away laughing. As I said, I hated it.

In junior high, most of the girls had graduated from “training” bra to B, C or D cup. We kept our books close to our chest to avoid being grabbed by some adolescent sex crazed boys ( I won’t mention any names, but you all know who you are) in the hallways between classes. There was no such thing as “sexual harassment” in the 1960’s. We just tolerated it.

I’ve never quite figured out the fascination with breasts. Is it the fact that they are our first source of nourishment and comfort? Or maybe the first publicly visible sign of budding sexuality? Whatever it is, men and women alike are interested in them. Admit it, ladies, you look almost as often as men do, comparing them to your own or wondering “Are those things real?”

As an adult I started calling my girls Thelma and Louise, after the movie characters. They were looking for trouble and usually managed to find it. Every guy I met wanted to get to know them, up close and personal. They mostly went away with their hopes dashed.

I nursed my four babies sitting in an old rocking chair, loving those middle of the night moments of joyous bonding with the lives I had created. I didn’t mind the sagging, the stretch marks, or leaky nipples. This is what breasts were designed for. I didn’t care that men stopped looking so shamelessly, or that I could not go braless because I actually needed a serious system to prop them up.

I started having regular mammograms after I turned forty. I looked forward to them like having a root canal. The man who invented that machine should have to have his testicles “grammed” on a yearly basis in the same sort of device. The indignity of slapping your boob onto a tray and having it smashed in a vice is quite unpleasant. The results were always unremarkable and I took it for granted that I could not get breast cancer. After all, the common thought when I was a young mother was that you had very little chance of getting breast cancer if you nursed your children. I had that covered. I thought I was safe.