The Art Of The Mammogram

Literally. Part One.

This is part one in a three-part series about my recent mammogram. I hope you enjoy it, and, frankly, think it will be impossible for you not to.

On Thursday I went to get a mammogram. I was really terrible about getting mammograms for a while. It took me five years after my doctor ordered me to get one to actually do it. Then a friend of my mother’s got breast cancer and was horrified I hadn’t gotten one and I promised her I would and then I couldn’t renege on the promise. She is hardly the first person I know who has had breast cancer, but she is the only person who extracted a promise from me about mammograms.

Ever since then I have had one of them a year, or one every two years? I don’t know. I just go when they tell me to. I can get nervous about health but mammograms don’t scare me, which is probably hubris on my part. I don’t dread them anymore than I dread doing other things that aren’t that explictly fun or revenue-producing. I’m not saying that I always have fun doing revenue-producing things but at least at the end of them you have revenue. At the end of a mammogram all you have (hopefully) is the knowledge that you are the same as you were before which is great, which is everything, but it can be hard to force yourself to do something that will merely leave you in the state (not sick) you already (hubris?) presumed yourself to be in.

In the main waiting room at the place I go to get mammograms, hanging on the wall next to the reception desk, there is a map of France. I don’t know what France has to do with mammograms. Is France a woman? It seems inarguably true that Americans feminize France. Still, I am not prepared to make any binding statements about the gender of France.