Breasts Like Pizza Dough

Who likes mammograms? Nobody. It is a flawed system, in which something round and attached vertically to your body is supposed to become flat and extend horizontally between two pieces of glass. The technician is pulling and tugging on you like she expects your breasts to be pizza dough, which she can twist like bread sticks.

The lady at the registration desk has a collection of photos of her family at her station. And they all face me instead of her. Why does she have them when she can't even see them? Why does she want me to look at her family? Why does she even have to have this many framed family photos at her work station? Is she going to forget she has family if she doesn't have the BACKS OF THE FRAMES looking at her all day? I don't understand this.

This is a change. They put an identity wrist band on me, and I'm only having a mammogram. Is there a chance I won't survive the mammogram and they won't be able to identify my body without this tag? I'll get lost in the jumble of women who were twisted to death that day in the mammogram lab? Or do they think I have a stunt double in the wings who was going to sneak in and take my mammogram instead of me? They want to be sure that it is me attached to my breasts, not some imposter.

The xray technician puts little band-aids on my nipples. They are purple with pink and green flowers on them, and each one has a tiny little pink fake nipple on it. Why do I need this? The technician tells me some women don't have noticeable nipples and it confuses the people reading the xrays. For the past 15 years I've been having mammograms done without artificial nipples. Have the doctors been confused all that time? (Or are they stupider now?) But I have fairly obvious parts. Nursing a baby will do that to you. It is obvious I am obvious, but I get the band-aids anyway. The fake ones are not even as obvious as the real ones. This makes no sense whatsoever.

"What do you do if someone comes in with a pierced nipple?" She doesn't have an answer for it. I speculate that maybe the pierced nipple crowd has not reached the age of mammograms yet.

The wrist band is on my right wrist. I am right-handed and do not handle scissors well with my left hand. I spend the afternoon trying to wrestle this band off my wrist. I don't have the nerve to try to pull the band-aids off.