Beginning: My First Mammogram

My mother is a breast cancer survivor. Even prior to her diagnosis and healing, I was constantly on my soapbox about how mammograms should be provided to young women. Because of my strong family history, my insurance covers regular mammograms starting at 35. Recently I got a prescription from my doctor and off I went to Lenox Hill Hospital.

Upon scheduling the exam, I had a feeling of real gravity. I knew I was okay; I just felt the weight of this kind of test. After all, it is an exam that is checking for cancer, a potentially lethal disease, and to go through with one we must look squarely in the face of our own mortality. What I felt was most certainly the feeling of “dis-ease” brought on by looking for a “disease”. The synchronicity of these words is no accident. Disease, and the potential of it, is uncomfortable to say the least.

So in I went to the hospital. They had to take several rounds of scans because the doctor felt that the first set had something out of the ordinary. Due to my strong family history, they take no chances. When the doctor came back into the examination room a second time to ask me to take an immediate ultrasound, the gravity of the tests grew a bit heavier on my shoulders. My only thought was perhaps my mind-body connection is not as a strong as I think it is.

I went into the ultrasound room, and the exam took a solid 20 minutes. As I was lying there, I thought about what I might do if indeed the abnormality was something of concern. What would I do if I was asked to have a biopsy? How would I deal with a diagnosis of cancer at age 35? Sadly, it has become more common in my generation than in those generations who have come before us. My mind was blank. I had no idea what I do, and so I waited and breathed.

The doctor read the ultrasound with a sigh of relief. He saw that the abnormality was not cause for alarm. He said he would review with his attending and then send the report to my gynecologist. He also noted that mammograms among young women are very difficult to read because the younger we are, the more dense our tissue is. Reading abnormalities in dense tissue can be deceiving and this is made still more difficult by my petite and mostly lean body type. What was supposed to be a 20 minute baseline exam turned into a 2 and a half hour event in which I felt fine, then felt worried, and then felt fine again.

I walked out of the hospital and took in a full breath in the sunlit air. I exhaled with a big sigh, though the lesson was not lost on me. My mortality is a very real thing, and I must live accordingly. Most people spend a lot of years, particularly their early ones, not looking at or thinking about death. Because of the deaths in my family at a young age, I have never had that luxury. The moment I could contemplate life, I began to contemplate death in equal measure. After all, we cannot have one without the other.