It was the usual mammogram drill, undress from the waist up, put on the pink gown open in the front. “Don’t bother putting your arms in,” the technician instructed me. “Just snap it at the top.” It created a casual, yet chic, minor super-hero look. I waited for her return, trying in vain not to expose myself with each flip of the magazine page.
I moved through the four standard poses much like a topless yoga class. “Wait here while I check the films,” she said. A few moments later she returned bearing the news that we needed to redo the left side. “No problems, but we didn’t get a whole lot of tissue in the film.” That’s because it’s small I thought but dutifully offered up my left breast once again.
This time she wrestled me into the machine like an army drill sergeant with a rowdy new recruit. Cranking the machine down, but not stopping at my personal pain threshold, she asked, “Can you get any closer to the machine?” Only if I step in it I thought, but complied as best I could. It was now clamped so tightly, I feared my breast might be hanging out the other side as if it had been through a pasta machine.
“No! No! No! This isn’t working,” she said, sounding exasperated. She then began to knead my breast like a mound of bread dough. Cranking it back down, she pulled my left shoulder blade along with my breast into the machine.
Putting her hands on her hips, she stepped back, furrowing her brow as she glared at my breast now flattened like roadkill. “I’m going to need some help with this one,” she announced as she turned and left me alone clamped helplessly to the machine.
I expected her to return with the Crocodile Hunter whispering to the camera: “What ‘ave we got ‘ere? Crikey mate!” In reality she returned with a diminutive woman with the strength of three burly sailors. They pushed, pulled and prodded my unruly breast into submission. The little one had her knee in my back and my arm twisted at an unlikely angle, smashing my face up against the machine like an arrest scene from COPS.
They finally had me and my breast where they wanted me. “Hold your breath! Don’t move!” she scolded. “But relax.”
Fifteen minutes later, she released my breast and quite possibly my left ovary from the machine’s grip. I feared my breast would smack my left kneecap when I stepped away from the machine.
I went home and put on my Wonderbra. After that ordeal, it’s going to take awhile to fluff the girls back up.