Pressed And Pleated

From Trousering Your Weasel.

So they called me after my last mammogram to tell me they weren't happy with one of the pictures, and would I come in to get the right side done again? And allow time for an ultrasound. Okay. I never did take a good picture.

I've done this before. The last time I was in a panic, and when I was told the appointment was a week out, I asked them to call me if there was a cancellation so I could get in earlier. They did call and I shot out for Kaiser like I'd been spring-loaded. We did the mammograms over again, several times, using concentrated little plates to zero in on a particular few inches of my personal geography, and then they shook their heads sadly and led me to ultrasound, and finally they asked me to go in to the doctor's office for a consultation, and he said everything was fine. Whatever worrisome thing that had been on the film was no longer on the film.

"Where'd it go?" I asked, regretting once again I had not brought extra underpants.

Well, he explained, it probably wasn't there in the first place. It was just a little mammogram technician joke, something to break up the tedium. In all likelihood she had accidentally gotten a little pleat in there. I can see how it could happen. It's like when you're sewing a quilt and there are lots of layers of fabric and batting and thicknesses and everything looks all smooth on top but when you flip it over you discover you've stitched wrinkles into the thing.

Anyway I'm not worried about this. It's probably nothing. And even if it isn't nothing, time has done a number on my ability to work up a good panic. If they've got to get in there and drill or take the whole thing off, so be it. Lop the other one off while you're at it. I wouldn't want to end up always walking in circles.

But it's probably nothing. There's so much opportunity on a woman like me to stitch in an inadvertent pleat. They don't take merely the breast, after all. They gather up any flesh in the vicinity and heave that in there, too. After a certain age there's no real telling what's breast tissue and what isn't. Things are sprawling toward the sides and into the back-fat folds and just to be on the safe side they like to haul all of it around and jam it in the vise. For a few seconds, from the rear, I look like a thirteen-year-old. Then they release the plates and everything rolls back and wobbles for a bit before settling down, comfy and loose as the cat's pajamas.

It was always hard for me to imagine how they were able to do a mammogram on a man. Not the kind of man who has boobs, but ones like Dave. He has everything he's supposed to, but nothing extra. I worry sometimes that without natural fat gussets, he might rip his skin open while sneezing. And yet, a few years ago, he actually did go in for a mammogram. I have no idea what I was doing that was so danged important that I missed the opportunity to observe that. It is nearly beyond my ability to imagine.

But I have a feeling that if someone were to come in the room while he was undergoing his mammogram, they might have concluded that the plates were locked up, and the technician was sliding him in there like a credit card, trying to pop them open again.

Update: It was nothing. Just another mammogram technician joke. Ha ha ha, mammogram technician! You are a stitch! They were looking for something "below the breast, on the chest wall." I told you. If I had a tumor under my shoulder-blade, they could find it in a mammogram.

Pinned Down

 I'm sitting on the cusp of Libra and Virgo, which puts me at risk of an astrological wedgie. But really I'm a Libra through and through. I hold the balances; I see both sides of an issue. I don't like to get pinned down. In spite of that, I just went in for my annual mammogram.

In the interest of my health, I have my annual mammogram every fifteen months or so. Fifteen-month years do wonders for your longevity. This time, after taking the required four pictures, they asked for a do-over. They said I moved. What moving? There's no moving. If the fire alarm goes off, I'm screwed. Nothing pins a girl down like a mammogram.

The woman in charge (let's call her Adolph) carefully stuffs your breast onto the bottom plate, hauling in a little extra from the belly, armpit and the lowermost of chins, and then takes the top plate and smashes you to a thickness that she can read through. The instructions are on the bottom plate.

This used to be more painful, but as one obtains maturity, as here defined by a marked decrease in sexual attractiveness, one's breasts begin to lose all their internal architecture, replacing it with a sort of apathetic goo. In the context of a mammogram, the procedure now involves less stuffing and cramming than merely peeling the tissue off the torso like a piecrust and rolling it out onto the plate. The top plate is now superfluous.

One year I got a letter afterwards suggesting I should come back in for a recheck. There was an "anomaly," and a date available in two weeks. I'm not the sort of person who can survive two weeks in a state of panic, so I badgered them until they admitted they weren't really doing anything just then, just sitting around eating pancakes and pita bread and playing with their food, and I raced in. The technician brought out my x-ray and hung it up on the wall for reference.

What these pictures used to look like, pre-menopause, with all the architecture intact, was something you might see from the Hubble telescope: millions of little stars and thready gases and nebulae, in which trained personnel can detect suspicious planets. I'd seen one of mine before. This one was deep space, all darkness, no nebulae at all, with the Star of Bethlehem blazing away right in the middle. I could see it from across the room. "Is that thing in the middle the anomaly we're looking at?" I whimpered, visualizing a tiny tumor glowing in a manger. The technician nodded. She used a more focused x-ray machine and zeroed in on my supernova. Then she left the room with the x-ray to show the doctor,  leaving me with an inadequately distracting group of women's magazines. At times like these, one is no longer interested in how to keep pounds off during the holidays, or five new recipes for fried chocolate.

Adolph isn't allowed to tell you anything about your x-rays, even though you suspect she knows as much as the doctors do. She came back in and apologized that she needed to take a few more shots. Fifteen minutes later she came back and said she needed to escort me to stage two, Ultrasound.

By the time we'd reached the Ultrasound room, I had run through a number of items that needed changing in my will, and while she was consulting the doctor about the new results, I'd begun a preliminary list of music I thought would be nice for my funeral. She returned to accompany me and my breasts to stage three, a stern interrogation. The doctor had my old x-ray, the one with the big star, hung up next to a series of new ones, which were entirely blank. "As you can see," he said, using the pointer, "we can't find the anomaly anymore. We probably got a little pleat in there the first time. You don't seem to have anything in your breasts at all. You're good to go."

Nothing in them at all. I gave them an affectionate little pat, without taking my hands from my lap.

Sniff This

Drug enforcement agents in the United States are peeved at Guyana for allowing cocaine shipments onto flights originating in their country. Officials at JFK airport in New York were incensed to find a suitcase from Guyana packed with fifty pounds of pure cocaine, but what did they expect? There's a surcharge for over fifty pounds.

The Guyana airport is currently patrolled by a trio of drug-sniffing dogs, two of them elderly and one with a bit more spark, but all three have proven nearly useless in detecting drugs. The trainers in charge of the dogs have complained that their task is hampered by the government's refusal to share (supply, rather) any cocaine for training purposes. This means each dog must be trained to learn the smells of everything that is not cocaine, and then to alert at any unknown smell. This is a long process and the result is a fully trained canine corps so decrepit they are rarely moved to lift their muzzles off the linoleum. A test dog ("Zippo") who was allowed to sniff cocaine in training proved too bouncy to be reliable, although he seemed to be getting an awful lot done.

"Zippo"

There are many uses for dogs in the sniffing world. They run the gamut from the famous bloodhound cadaver-dogs that go on search missions, to your friendly neighborhood menstruation-pointers, but there is also quite a bit of promise in the field of dogs that sniff people who aren't dead yet. With training, some dogs have been shown to be preternaturally effective in picking out people with cancer, even the ones who do not have moles shaped like Milk Bones. Rates top 99% in the detection of some forms of cancer, such as lung. The dogs are even able to detect breast cancer 88% of the time, with a low number of false positives, a record that is far better than that of mammograms. Given the discomfort many women report when they are having their breasts slammed into wafers by a mammogram machine, researchers are encouraged. Dr. Preston Pulpit of the Institute of Sadistic Medicine has proposed that a compromise protocol might be reached by pinning women in place with the mammogram machine and then bringing in the sniffer dogs. The radiology crew, widely reported as overworked and cranky, is enthusiastic.

But back to airports. Even a work crew of frail Guyanan dogs should probably have been able to detect the shipment of human heads that was, sadly, discovered instead by a remarkably loud employee of Southwest Airlines. There was nothing unusual about heads being shipped, airline officials tell us, although they were not satisfied with the package labeling. Some people have been startled by the notion that they may have shared airplane space with a crateful of heads, but this is not a concern of mine. I'm fine with anything that doesn't use up too much of the armrest.

My problem is that the number of heads, originally reported as "a whole bunch," was later revised to be "between forty and sixty." What, were they rolling around? Was it that hard to get a good count? Come on, people. These ain't grapes. Slap a post-it on every tenth head and let's strive for a little accuracy. If we're going to go to the trouble to check off the anatomical donor box on our driver's licenses, you owe us a decent head count.

Toot! Toot! All Aboard The Colonoscopy Bus

There's something positively electrifying about being with people who are all in one place for a common purpose, bursting with pent-up energy. Picture a starting line for a race. A roomful of kindergartners, waving their hands in the air to be picked. A colonoscopy clinic waiting room.

The waiting room is filled with patients and their designated drivers, so every other person is seated on the edge of his or her chair, clenched with something like excitement, accompanied by a dour companion, who is reading a magazine and breathing shallowly. There is a restroom just a few feet away. This is a good thing. This is a bad thing.

The atmosphere is very like that inside an airplane carrying first-time skydivers, everyone facing forward, maintaining focus. In some very specific respects, it's probably identical.

I couldn't help but think about this when I read about the mammogram bus in central Oregon. Health care can be a little hit-or-miss in rural areas, and many women find it onerous to cram in an appointment (as it were) for a mammogram when they have to travel so far to get one. So the Asher Community Health Center in Fossil, Oregon arranged to pick these women up and take them to Bend to get their x-rays, and work in a spa treatment and a shopping expedition along with it. It's almost a party atmosphere on the bus, with everyone anticipating a day of getting things permed, polished, painted, purchased, and pancaked. It's just this side of jolly.

And I couldn't help but think that if it works for women needing mammograms, maybe it can work for colonoscopy patients, too.

There are probably a few logistics problems to be worked out. The preparation for a mammogram consists of making an appointment and not applying deodorant. The preparation for colonoscopy is a bit more detailed, and leads to a general sense of urgency. So it would have to be part bus, part ambulance. Call it a "flatulance." The siren could be a lot of fun. The bus would require some retrofitting: plastic seat covers would be a good idea, and some sort of hose apparatus might have to be developed which could link individuals into the exhaust system. But a good engineer might be able to make the whole thing pencil out. Rigged up properly, fuel expenses should be close to nil. It should make a dent in the tailgating problem, too.