Southern Lady Code: Essays(26)

“He?” I said. “Who do you think my gynecologist is?”

She looked at my chart and confirmed that my gynecologist’s first name is very much a woman’s name in the way that Jennifer, Dorinda, and Clarice are most definitely women’s first names. She explained, “Oh, I call all doctors he because most doctors are men.”

“Oh, come on,” I said, “be a good little feminist!”

We did not speak for the remainder of my test, which turned out fine. I bought a larger pair of jeans. No more abdominal twinge.

The technician who gives me my follow-up mammogram has a thick gray ponytail and never stops talking. She tells me about her family’s history of breast cancer and calls me honey and baby more than my husband has done in our long life together.

I come from generations of women who do not like to be called honey or baby or anything else that a sexually harassed waitress or secretary or CEO might be called. Mama used to reprimand Papa for calling her “your mother” when he spoke about her to my sister or me.

“My name is Helen!” Mama would shout from another room.

My name is also Helen, and I ask for so much respect that my husband’s pet name for me is Mrs. Haris.

But here in this exam room with my top off with this stranger, her terms of endearment are a comfort to me. She sees the likes of me—I’d estimate—four times an hour, eight hours a day. She knows that I’m anxious, whether I want to admit it or not.

If there is a word for the opposite of a hypochondriac, I am that word. I take care of myself, but I don’t panic. A headache is just a headache. A cold doesn’t need antibiotics. I don’t Google symptoms. But I do practice preventative care. “Preventative care” is Southern Lady Code for sunscreen to ward off skin cancer and a crossword a day to keep Alzheimer’s away. I get annual checkups and, even though I have no maternal family history of breast cancer, since I turned forty, I get mammograms once a year.

But a friend of mine is fifty-eight and never had a mammogram because she’s afraid of radiation. My paternal grandaunt, who wore a leopard-print bikini well into her sixties, was so terrified of a mastectomy, she never went to a doctor until cancer ate a hole clean through her skin. One in twenty women are so terrified of finding cancer or something that looks like cancer—another technician told me—that they faint with a breast wedged in the machine. Some women bring rosary beads into the exam room. Some cry. It’s understandable. The lead aprons and metallic nipple stickers don’t put you at ease.

My technician warns me, “Now, I’m gonna get up close and personal.”

She comes at me like a linebacker. Or a mom trying to get her kid into a snowsuit.

When it comes to mammograms, you have to give in and give yourself over to the technician. Don’t fight her. Go limp like one of those inflatable car dealership wiggly men. Hold your arms up and let her jiggle your breast into place.

I, personally, have tits made for mammograms. They are 36 DD naturals, buoyant and round. Haven’t had a mammogram? Picture putting a water balloon between two coffee table books made out of taxicab partitions and flattening that balloon until right before it bursts.

That’s how it goes if you have my breasts: Baby Bear in the Goldilocks story of breasts, breasts that are just right. But if your breasts are too big, they have to be squashed one section at a time; and if your breast are too small, they have to be wrenched from your torso in a torture akin to what we on the playground used to call Indian burns.

There is a new machine they use to test your dumb boobs, I kid you not, called the Genius. It was invented—I suspect—at the same time as “dense breasts.” The Genius takes 3-D pictures and Sheryl Crow is the spokesperson; but for my follow-up, I’m having a regular no-brand-name mammogram with a smaller squeezer. How small? Instead of coffee table books, picture that 1980s TV talking tub of Parkay.

Breast cancer!

Par-kaaaaay!

The technician says, “Now THIS is gonna hurt.”

I ask, “Why would you tell me that?”

She says, “What, you want me to lie to you and tell you it’s gonna be like lemonade?”

I say, “I most certainly do.”

She loads and locks me. It hurts so much I curse like a fourth-grade boy on a field trip. There’s maybe a foot between me and whatever button she presses to take the image of my breast, but bless her, she rushes to it. I hear a series of clicks. Even if I wanted to, I can’t turn to see what she’s doing behind me.

She says, “Don’t breathe, don’t breathe.”

If I breathe, I’ll blur the picture. If I blur the picture, she’ll have to take another picture. Another picture means more time in the vise.

I hold my breath. And, while it is only for a matter of seconds, it’s enough time for me to develop a conspiracy theory: the medical community is making money hand over fist off our fear of double mastectomies. So many of us are getting called back for follow-up mammograms and ultrasounds (a test in which your breasts are lubed up like Cinnabons and each is worked over like I used to work over a Centipede trackball). Next year, they’re gonna want a biopsy. I’m not gonna want to do it. I wanna go home.

My technician releases me.

As I put on my paper robe, she invites me to come around her protective screen to look at the inside of my breast. There are white specks behind the nipple.