Mammogram MGH by Dolores
It was perhaps around 1990 that I drove
to the Mammogram Clinic in Boston and encountered
a technician who appeared to be in a very bad mood. Fight with
boyfriend? Time of the month?
The procedure for my right breast was
more painful than usual—did she really need to press down that hard?—but it was
my left breast that would experience the brunt of her truculence.
Again and again Dolores claimed she would have to take another x-ray; something
was wrong with the films. Again and again, heedless of my outcries, she
pulled and pinched my nipple as if it were a cork stuck in a bottle, stretching
it onto the metal plate and squashing it down with the upper plate.
The edge of the lower one dug mercilessly into my ribs.
Dolores, to my sorrow, left me with
unmatching breasts forever more.
My primary care physician said
that refusing to have any more mammograms was a choice I was free to make. I
stopped, one procedure too late.
But never mind . . . nobody knows except
a few people out in Blogland.
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