Yearly Fearly
(your courageous essayist waiting for her turn at the wheel of squeeze)
It’s Mammogram Day! (results below!)
Assuming everyone knows what a mammogram is but, if not, it’s a very special machine that squeezes the hell out of your bazooms to look for little tiny tigers (cancer) that might have developed and are trying to get out of the (ba)Zoo(ms) and have a party in your lymphatic system and the rest of your organs. More on why I call them tigers down the post.
Funnily enough, two men invented the mammography machine, but two women have helped change and humanize it. Still, I think it’s a mean ole machine.
(see that squeezy thing? ouch!)
Now that that is out of the way, the main reason it’s important to do these yearly is that they catch cancers early, when they might not do as much harm, or at least you can intervene because according to the CDC “Each year in the United States, about 264,000 cases of breast cancer are diagnosed in women and about 2,400 in men. About 42,000 women and 500 men in the U.S. die each year from breast cancer. Black women have a higher rate of death from breast cancer than White women.”
While mammograms are really uncomfortable, they are not as bad as dealing with cancer and surgery and radiation and chemo.
Ask me how I know.
In 2019, my OBGYN was like…”When was your last mammogram?” and as god as my witness I had no idea because it was at least 5 years prior and we’d moved between states in the interim and been dealing with a lot of situations with jobs and the kids and then I had another set of surgeries and well, I forgot and none of my current GP type doctors mentioned it at all, and why didn’t it come up on the “MyChart” thing that many doctors use to help you get all your yearly’s updated?
I don’t know.
I didn’t worry though because breast cancer doesn’t run in my family, and I’d never had any issues at all. Ha!
They saw something suspicious, and I had to come back in and do what’s called a diagnostic mammogram which is a regular one plus extra? And they tell you immediately after if they think there is a problem. Which there was, come to find out, and so the next appointment was a biopsy, which is kind of like a mammogram (cause they place the offending breast in the squeezy thing really really extra tightly and you just sort of…hang there helplessly because it would be VERY hard to rip the breast out of the clamp. Then they insert a needle but it makes kind of a drilling sound?
Did it? I may have made that up in my mind because it really was like them drilling for some rare mineral, only in my case it was tissue inside of one of my milk ducts.
Not to be confused with a milk dud, but actually it was about the same size.
Turns out there was a bit of cancer in there.
Ductal Carcinoma In Situ (DCIS) which means a cancer inside (encapsulated) a milk duct in my breast. In my case it was close to my chest wall.
They test the tissue and stage it so you know what kind and level of cancer you have.
Stage 0 is when it is inside of the duct and contained thus the Tiger in a Cage.
If it’s outside the duct its 1 (or 1 b or c or more) and the Tiger is out of the cage. If it gets to the lymph nodes, that’s like the Tiger getting on that cute little kiddie train at the Zoo? But the train may only be at the station. If the Tiger rides that train all up into the body then cancer can metastasize into Tigers all over the place.
I know that’s not a scientific explanation but that’s what worked for me. Though…Tigers are beautiful animals. In fact, once when I was a very small child my parents took me to the Dallas Zoo and my mom said I leapt out of the stroller and tried to climb up to the bars of the Tiger cage and get in to “pet the kitty” (they had terrible zoos back then and frankly all Zoos are kind of awful to me, but they are much nicer now—Tigers should be in their homelands where they can be free), so maybe Tiger isn’t the best image. Or maybe it is. It is a wild and unbridled force after all.
( credit to http://zoohoo.dallaszoo.com/2016/02/05/five-sumatran-tigers-you-must-get-to-know/)
Anyway, I had Stage 0 and it was hormone sensitive.
Stage 0 seems like a terrible name. Zero sounds like nothing is happening, when clearly something was happening and could get worse. There are number of Facebook support groups for various breast cancers and there was one just for DCIS and there was a lot of complaining about how the other stages kind of dissed the Zeros like it wasn’t “real” enough.
DCIS is real. And it’s not as bad as Stage 4 absolutely, all the stages have increasingly terrible things attached to them and I’d hope that we could all just allow everyone to have their experience and honor it. I had to have two surgeries, because the first one didn’t get the full margins, I had a month of radiation, and then visits with an oncologist and drugs that made me feel horrible.
And fear. Each year.
Up to this point I’ve been clear. Today is a reset of the year. And so dutifully I went in and wrote up half of this post as I was sitting in the lobby of the same area in the hospital where I had to get radiation treatment a few years ago.
A wonderful imaging assistant wearing a fantastic medical smock and pants covered in rose print took me through the test, very gently and kindly, and it was over in about 10 minutes tops.
Hopefully, I’ll find out tomorrow that it’s still clear. But, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous. Finding out I had even State 0 was realizing that I didn’t know what was going on in there. And I suppose, ultimately, we never do know. We could be feeling perfectly find and boom! A thing! Something growing in there just having a good time with itself, and you’d just not have an inkling.
It’s like the ground under you just isn’t solid, and frankly, it isn’t. We have to believe that it is, most of the time to just get through the day. The month. The year.
I’ll get my result and if it’s normal, then I can feel like the earth is solid until about February of next year, when I’ll make my next appointment and so it will go. I won’t be afraid for at least another 11 months (unless of course the result is abnormal).
So that’s what I did today. And my advice to you is—-Check your breasts, get your mammogram, advocate for nicer machines, and keep living your life even if you don’t know the outcome. And respect the tigers inside you.
Update: I got the results, and I’m clear again until next year!