I have just come back from hospital having had my mammaries grammed. Yes, it is nearly a year since my surgery, and to comammarate this anniversary, my boobs must be squeezed and scanned again. A trip down mammary lane. Enough of the mammary puns now, please.
This will be an annual check to see whether the cancer has come back. Had I not already had breast cancer, I would be having this mammogram once every three years, so I feel rather safer than if I hadn’t.
The procedure itself remains the same boob-squishingly hilarious process that it was last year. I note to myself how matter-of-fact I am about these things now. It’s part of life, specifically of life continuing.
I stood in front of the booby trap and was positioned by the radiographer. When she said, ‘Take a step to the right …’, it jogged my mammary (sorry) of discos in Manchester University’s cellar bar thirty years ago, dancing in formation to Let’s Do The Timewarp Again. At least there were no pelvic thrusts involved this time. ‘This will be a bit uncomfortable’, she said, but it wasn’t.
I was supposed to have four scans taken – for each boob, one horizontal and one sideways. However, my left boob is so enormous that it needed two scans to cover its whole area. The right one, having had a chunk removed by the surgery, is now sufficiently trim to fit into just the one frame.
No results today, though. That will have to wait to my next appointment with the oncologist, on 14 November, the actual, to-the-day anniversary of my surgery.
