“It’s okay,” said the technician, because what else are you going to say to that sort of thing?

I had my first mammogram.

It all started a few weeks ago, when I went to the doctor for a desperate case of WTF, Period Edition — Mood swings that typically left me in a heap of tears and self-loathing, cramps like a kick in the gut from an angry robot (robots are strong, guys), blood that flowed like boxed wine at a bunco party.

She did the usual poking around, and when she got to my breasts, she poked a little more deliberately. Turned out I had a lump and would need to have it checked.

But there was no “booby” talk this time. No murmurs of reassurance. No promises of fixing what was broken. It was all business. Serious medical business. There was a job to do, and it was getting done.

I had initially wanted to go to the appointment alone, so that I could deal with any news I got in whatever way felt right, without worrying about whomever was escorting me. But a friend convinced me that wasn’t a good idea, and my teen daughter was not about to let me out of her sight, anyway. I dressed in some finery, convincing myself that bravery wore lipstick, popped some painkiller on the advice of twitter, and we headed out to the local hospital.

The waiting room was filled with elderly women, escorted by slightly less elderly women, and I thought it concrete proof that women live longer than men, but it’s not necessarily a comfortable or worry-free 5-10 years. I was called back rather quickly, which is the beauty of being the first appointment of the morning, and shown to a small dressing room, not unlike the ones in a department store where voices whisperlie that those ultra low cut jeans look fabulous on you and you should ignore the giant tsunami of fat rolling over the top, because all the cool kids have it. I was handed an extremely short gown, and a robe that was even shorter, wondered if Hugh Hefner weren’t going to pop out and deem me unfit for the grotto, in a new reality show “Who Wants Legionnaire’s Disease?” I was told I could keep everything on from the waist down.

“Um, I’m not wearing pants,” I said, gesturing down to my dress in a way that was embarrassingly obvious.

“Oh, well, that’s okay,” the nurse said, “I’m sure we’ve seen worse.”

Great.

I was shown back to a small room with a big machine. There was no question what it was for.

“This is Theresa, she’ll be performing your mammogram, then you’ll have an ultrasound to examine your lump.”

“Hi, Theresa. I’m not wearing pants.”

Theresa took a series of pictures of my breasts. I slipped first my left arm out of my gown and robe, while they hung off my right, then switched. My girls were kneaded, prodded, and pulled across a flat plate, then another plate came down and sandwiched them in a way that I didn’t know was possible. The pain was something akin to Mike Tyson punching me square in the tit, and then throwing in his infamous bite/tear. No joke, it was horrible.

When it was all, um, grammed, I was told a doctor would look at the scans and while I waited. I was shown to a room with a large table full of magazines, a television blaring a Meredith Viera-heavy segment of the Today show, and a single cup coffee maker. Two women, also in shorty robes, but wisely wearing pants, sat, flipping through magazines. No one spoke.

“Does anyone know where the bathroom is?” I asked, “I’m pretty sure that Theresa just squeezed the pee out of me. Anatomy lesson, your bladder is in your right breast!”

Both looked up, one pointed to a door down the hall.

I started to worry about trusting these people with my extremely vulnerable parts.

When I returned to the waiting room, a third medical person was standing there, waiting to talk to me. She said that the pictures from my breasts showed some abnormalities and I would need another set, to see if maybe it was a problem with the scans.

I was a fool for not heeding the obvious red flag in the restroom.

“I’m Diane. Theresa is busy, but it’s good to get different people to do them, anyway, because we all have different techniques.”

I don’t need technique. I don’t need style. I need a clean mammogram so I can get on with my life.

I had the second set of pictures, after apologizing to Diane for not wearing pants.

“I just didn’t know you could, you know?”

The second set of pics were unclear, as well. Theresa, who had finished with her patient, was called back into the room to see if she could figure out how to capture my apparently rogue breasts. The two women pored over the scans on a monitor in the corner of the room, and spoke as if I weren’t just feet away, about how the concerning spots appeared in some, but not others.

“Sorry!” I wanted to shout over to them. “Sorry about my breasts!”

Another set of pictures were taken, with both women working together to “roll the breast” and “position the lump, properly”. They were politely frustrated.

I was shown back to the waiting room, where two different women in robes — again, pants — were sitting quietly. One woman and I spoke about how she was here for her bi-yearly recheck, having defeated breast cancer a few years before. The other woman chimed in with the story of how her mother and grandmother had both died from breast cancer, and she got checked every six months, just in case.

I got nervous.

Diane came back in, and said they needed another picture or two. By this time, Mike Tyson had punched my tits numb, and I just wanted to get it over with.

After the last set, I was shown to an ultrasound room. I sighed and told Kim, the tech, my pants story, but it had lost some of its whimsy and I was over being embarrassed.

The ultrasound was just like the ones I had when I was pregnant with my children, but a little higher, and decidedly more grim. This was not the room where they saw a penis, or lack of, and told excited parents whether the bun in their oven was an Apple or a Moses. The good news that came from here was “life”.

After the unsexy, goop-assisted breast massage, sans happy ending, but while I was still lying flat on my back, pantsless, a man in a white coat came in and introduced himself as the doctor who had been looking at my scans, behind the scenes. I didn’t even bother with the pants apology. It was obvious I wasn’t wearing them, and he didn’t seem fazed.

He told me that the spots in my breasts were inconsistent, from mammogram to mammogram, meaning they were probably in my skin and that’s why they jumped around so much. He saw my confusion and assured me that was good. He also said I would need to come back in six months, just to make sure that was the case.

I was sent back to the dressing room, where I finally put some clothes on, four hours after donning the gown and robe, and stopped by the receptionist’s desk to schedule an October appointment.

Guess what somebody is getting for her 40th birthday? Titty punches!

“Okay. What test did you need?”

“A mammogram.”

“Fine. Let me get some information from you.”

She asked all the pertinent stuff — Name, Phone Number, Insurance Info. She asked if she could have my social security number or would I rather not. Stuff like that doesn’t freak me out in the least. Please, if someone were to steal my identity, they could only improve it.

“I’d rather not,” I said, surprising myself.

When she asked my date of birth, she automatically assumed.

“So, routine screening, then?”

“No, ma’am. Diagnostic.”

I have a lump in my breast.

I went to the doctor, yesterday, for a myriad of reasons. The breast lump was not one of them. I was, in fact, aware of its existence, but it had slipped my mind. I was more worried about the extreme PMS I was having. PMS so bad that, every month, I think, “I’d rather die than go through this again.” And it was only getting worse.

A few days ago, I had reached my breaking point. I was at work, doing the usual Monday stuff, when tears came. I wasn’t crying, per se, just tearing. Madly. I put down the cards I was organizing and marched over to my boss.

“I need to go to the doctor.”

“Okay, when?”

“Right now.”

He seemed confused. To be fair, while he is an idiot, it was confusing. We had spoken just a few minutes before and I was holding it together just fine.

“I’ll call you,” I said,on my way out the door.

I showed up at the local clinic and waited two hours to be called to the back. Then two more hours before seeing a doctor. I didn’t care. I couldn’t afford four hours off of work, but I also couldn’t afford the breakdown I was having.

The clinic doctor seemed worried. She called and got me a GYN appointment for the next morning, something almost unheard of, especially for the upscale practice she scored it with.

“Go home and rest,” she said, “Help is coming.”

I called my boss and told him I’d not be back in. Also, that I was going to be late the next day, because I had to see a specialist. He didn’t even ask.

The next morning, I showed up to the “Women’s Center”, located in a local hospital. I was wearing a cute babydollish top, and was asked twice when I was due. I wasn’t mad, I am fat and the place was packed with pregnant ladies. Besides, I got to say “Me? Oh, I’m barren” twice, which is my favorite.

I was made to undress, gown open in the front, and sit on the white paper. I didn’t really feel like checking twitter or reading any of the lady mags (did you know Women’s Day is still in business?), so I stared at an oil painting hanging on the wall. The subject was a field of red flowers. Really red. The paint stood out in peaks, impossibly thick, dark red.

“Note to self,” I thought, “Ask if art was painted with menstrual blood. That will lighten the mood and, also, I need to know.”

A young, unfairly beautiful Nurse Practitioner came in and ruined my cool with the sympathetic look on her face.

“I got the notes from your doctor. I’m so sorry. Let’s help you.”

We went through the routine. We chatted about pregnancies and birth control and my horrible periods and other body stuff. She asked why it had been six years since I had seen a Gynecologist and I answered truthfully.

“It didn’t seem important.”

“It is.”

She came up next to me and went straight to second base but it didn’t seem like a big deal because she was about to have me scooch down and hit a home run with nothing but a latex glove and a speculum.

She stopped her movement and felt around a little more intently. She felt around a little more, and her mouth made the tiniest frown movement. Tiny, but not imperceivable.

I scooched, and she hit her home run.

“Everything looks good down there,” she said, after I had sat up, “but I want to talk to you about your boobies.”

Normally, I would roll my eyes at her use of such a childish term for what were obviously bangin’ tits, but I let it go, as my memory had flooded with the fact that the last few (dozen) times I had, uh, pleasured myself, I felt something that struck me as not right.

“Oh. The right one?”

“Yes. There is a lump in there that we need to get checked out.”

Her voice had changed. Her bedside manner was spot on, but she had gone from girlfriendy to doctory, just like that.

We also discussed my mood swings and depression associated, apparently, with hormone fluctuations. Turns out it was beyond PMS, into something called PMDD and it was real and I wasn’t even making it up or being dramatic, at all.

She also handed me a pamphlet about Polycystic Ovary Syndrome.

“I’m going to schedule an ultrasound. I suspect they will find this, so I just want you to have the information.”

A syndrome now? This was too much.

She prescribed me a mild antidepressant, scheduled the ultrasound, and handed me a paper with a crude drawing of my breasts, a circle right in the same spot I had felt the lump, and some phone numbers on it. She held on to that paper just a second longer than she needed to.

“You have to schedule the mammogram yourself, but I need you to do it right away, okay?”

I nodded, having suddenly developed an extreme case of brain fog.

I headed to the lab to have some blood drawn, clutching the pile of paperwork that said I was right to see a doctor, but making me wish I hadn’t. I was sure I was going to this appointment to be dismissed with “Nothing’s wrong” and “Lose weight, fatty”, but I wasn’t. I was taken seriously, about serious issues.

The NP emailed me today, with my bloodwork results. I’ve gone, in the span of 24 hours, from being someone who prided herself on taking no medications to someone who is taking five pills a day. Someone with follow up appointments. Someone who is suddenly uncomfortable in her own body. Feeling betrayed. Seeing it as unreliable.

I want, more than anything, to go back to not knowing.

I’m going to need those antidepressants.

It wasn’t very far into the Oscar-nominated movie Black Swan that it became apparent something was very wrong with Natalie Portman’s character, Nina. An overachieving ballerina with a mother who is borderline infatuated with her daughter, her beautiful but extremely fragile facade begins to crack almost as soon as we are introduced to her.

She practices her dance, obsessively and frantically, to the point of injury; she sees things that aren’t there; she vomits repeatedly; and she harms herself with picking and scratching. As these things are happening in the movie, the audience in the theater where I am sitting gets a little vocal. They gasp, they murmur, they all seem to share the same opinion of the crazy girl. I nod and murmur, as well. Vigorously. Perhaps a little too vigorously. I pull it back a bit.

But I’m uncomfortable. Some of those “crazy” things that Nina does, I also do. And the gasps feel like stinging judgment.

I live with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, which presents as both Body Dysmorphic Disorder and Dermatillomania. This basically means I am preoccupied with my appearance in an unhealthy way — often having a distorted view of that appearance — and I scratch at myself.

I’ve always known that I was a little bit off. Of course, most teen girls are critical of their own looks, but I was extreme about it. I would become fixated on tiny flaws I would find with myself, mostly on my face.

“I don’t see it,” friends would say.

“Right there!” I’d reply, completely frustrated, “The skin is a different color. It’s disgusting.”

Coming from a family with roots in Scotland, there was no shortage of freckles to point at, be consumed by, and scratch at. “That shouldn’t be there,” I’d think, and try to remove it. I’d stare in the mirror for long periods of time, making me seem vain or insecure. But it was more than that.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, BDD morphed into bulimia. I spent a few years vomiting, obsessing about imperfections, and scratching. I weighed myself several times every day and misused laxatives, and tiny blemishes (and, sometimes, nothing at all) turned into scars. I lived in a house with giant, sliding mirrors for closet doors and could stand in front of them for hours, nose almost to glass, tormented by every imperfection. I stopped leaving the house except for desperate runs to the grocery store so that I could feed my family and the void in me — food which the void would send back a short time later into the toilet. Plus there was the seven-day a week trek to the gym. Since gyms tend to put mirrors on every flat surface in the building, I could stare at myself while I chased perfection (which I wouldn’t know even if it existed and I had achieved it). While the other gym users would watch TV while they worked out, coming and going around me, time would stand still as I watched a distorted version of myself climb a staircase to nowhere for hours on end. Then I would quickly run home for more up-close inspection and scratching. At some point, the scratching became subconscious, and I could be be doing something as simple as watching TV and end up with blood on my face and hands, not remembering hurting myself. That was one of the hardest things for me to watch in the movie — Nina seeing the damage she’d done without even realizing it, and looking confused. Add a look of disappointment upon realizing she’d been doing it, and that’s the most I have ever looked like Natalie Portman in my life.

Today, I’m healthier. I’ve been through years of therapy and tried several anxiety medications, but I’ve settled on meditation and visualization when my brain starts whirring with destructive thoughts. I only have a few mirrors in my house and limit my time in front of them. On bad days, that means setting an alarm for 15 minutes so that I can apply my makeup and brush my hair but not get lost in my reflection. I still scratch at myself, especially when I am under a lot of stress, but usually realize it before too long and find another way to deal with what’s going on.

So, I related more than some people to Nina as she danced with madness and, ultimately, was consumed by it. It was a month ago, and I’m still having nightmares. Not about the movie, but about the experience of seeing the movie. And the disgust of the audience. Of course, I’m not ripping all the skin off of my hand or pulling feathers from my back and, objectively, I know that the behavior is shocking and their responses were normal. But objectivity has little to do with things when you have my condition. If it did, I wouldn’t have all these scars.

In my life, I’ve tried out many a ‘do on my Little Miss Don’t. For the first 25 years or so, she roamed free. Like a gazelle. Or maybe a porcupine. Then I found porn and realized that everyone didn’t look like me down under. Up until then, I had only seen other cooches in anatomy textbooks or National Geographic magazines or in my college dorm room. Every one I had ever seen pretty much looked like mine, give or take a few tufts. This world of partially hairless love pillows intrigued me. A snoozy sex life (I was watching the porno alone so, uh, yeah) lead me to try to jazz up my vageezy. I took a little off the bottom at first, as sort of a fuzzy version of training wheels. Or, at least that was the plan. But, for some reason, I couldn’t get it right. I couldn’t get it straight. I tried again and again to make a neat triangle, taking off tiny bits at a time. The triangle got smaller and smaller. Narrower and narrower. Soon, I was left with Hitler’s mustache, staring back from the handheld mirror. No, I supposed that wouldn’t do. I went full tilt boogie, cleaning up until all I was left with was a mound resembling a hamburger bun, split and all.

While it took a little getting used to, visually, I wasn’t really looking at it all that much. What I WAS doing was feeling it. It. Was. Awesome. I felt free, I felt sexy, I felt itchy. Okay, yes, it was a little itchy. But free and sexy! I vowed to never go back to the jungle!

But, time and two kids lead me back. I wandered away from the clean shaven muffin of yesteryear. I got busy. I got hairy. Then I got a job showing my business on camera. I went back to completely bare down there. But it seemed like a chore. It was for work, so I automatically resented it. It was a uniform for my pussy. As soon as I went back to wearing clothes for a living, I went bushy again. In fact, I’ve gone back and forth most of my adult life. My poor ladyfriend is a schizophrenic in a hall of mirrors.

So, back to this morning. I didn’t have time to fix her up right then and there in the shower. Once you get to the stage where it looks like you are smuggling Rip Van Winkle in your panties, it takes a while to right the wrong, if you know what I mean. I was late, as always, but drove extra careful on my way to work, lest I have an accident and have to be stripped naked in a hospital, only for them to find Richard Simmons’ fatter twin between my legs. I also tiptoed around at work, sure this would be the day that I amputate my arm in the flower chopper or one of my excoworkers comes in all disgruntled to settle the score. Not with me but, you know, sometimes there’s collateral damage. “Please don’t let me die today,” I prayed, “Not this way. Won’t spontaneously voiding my bowels be punishment enough for my misdeeds?” What I secretly DIDN’T reveal in the prayer was the fact that spontaneously voiding my bowels is not unique to death and, instead, pretty much a daily event for me.

So, I made it through the day without incident and am finally safe at home where I can makeover Wednesday Addams and take her from slightly frumpy to totally humpy. But it’s late. I had a hard day. I am tired. And the Berenstain Bears are on. Tomorrow, though, tomorrow… doubleprayers and then double blades. Probably.

Fuck Yeah, Motherhood! on Blogger Body Calendar

“She’s really big,” he said to her, “Bigger than I thought. We’re going to have to adjust for that.”

She nodded as tears welled up in the corners of my eyes.

“I’m right here, you know,” I said, trying for indignation but managing little more than a whimper, “I can hear you.”

I was at an urgent care clinic, on a cold, hard table, having x-rays taken for an injury I had sustained at work. I was hurting as they contorted my body into positions that would have been uncomfortable, had I been in the best of health. Then, he said it. “She’s really big.”

“We see you,” he said in response to my meager protest, as they both moved to stand behind the wall that protects their genitals from radiation. I was lying on my back, legs straight, arms spread out, like a modern day fat Jesus. I was shot through with whatever kind of unicorn on treadmill-driven magic takes pictures of your guts and pronounced “sprained, but not broken”.

But they were wrong. I WAS broken. Broken because I had gone in to the doctor unexpectedly, wearing an old, faded bra with shot elastic and worn out straps and granny panties fit only for heavy flow days and actual visits to my granny. I was insecure, scared, and hurting. I was helped up onto a scale where I was pronounced (more like “announced”) to be 5 foot 6 and 223 pounds. Honestly, I didn’t feel bad about my stats. I know my body size and am usually cool with it. What I DID feel bad about was an old man, quite a few pounds heavier than I was, it appeared, poking his icy hands into my sidechub and judging my sprained but not broken body as his young, beautiful assistant nodded.

I felt sad. Really sad. Then I felt mad. Really mad. Then I remembered that I am totally fucking awesome. I am a good mother, first rate friend, writer of funny shit, and dead sexy bitch who can rock a work uniform, a bathrobe, a formal dress, or a hospital gown that is open in the back, revealing a five year old bra and some jank ass granny panties and he is lucky as hell to have gotten to poke my delicious muffin top which he was probably only being shitty about because he wanted to butter it and take a bite but he can’t because, well, you know… radiation. That’s right, bro: sprained, but not broken. Don’t you forget it.

*The edit from “lie” to “lay” (my first instinct, by the way) provided by the lovely and not at all weird Siren of Siren Song. Go give her some love and know that she is the most gentle grammar dominatrix, ever. Thanks, Siren!